Skylar's Blog & Podcast

Philippians 1:21-23

I just watched the most interesting movie. Have you ever seen District 9? The gist behind District 9, for those of you who haven't seen it, is a spaceship full of aliens crash lands on earth and the aliens are stuck. For a while nothing happens: no aliens come out and no humans go in. Finally, a team of humans force their way into the ship and find hundreds of thousands of aliens starved and in need of help. So, they set up an area for the aliens to live, and they name this area District 9. It was fenced in, surrounded by military, and was pretty much a slum. As the movie comes to a close one of the renegade aliens is talking to his son, and his son says something that hit me between the eyes: he asks his dad, "Are we going home?" This kid had been separated from his home for a long time, and he missed it. He probably woke up nearly every day hoping soon he would get to go where he belongs.

I was talking with a close friend last week, and we were talking about different struggles we are having, and I began to talk about my upcoming wedding. Before we were talking about what we thought God was teaching us in the midst of these tense times of our lives and we had both agreed God was asking us to learn patience. However, something else hit me all of a sudden. I started talking about the upcoming wedding and I made this remark: "If Jesus were to come back before I married Kayla I wonder if the disappointment of not marrying her would really take away from the amazing excitement that our Savior had finally come back?" I thought about it for a moment and I realized it probably would...How depressing, how evil. I am not saying being disappointed in not being able to marry Kayla is a bad thing. God would expect that seeing He has put inside of me a crazy love for her. However, how sad that the earthly marriage I thought I was going to experience would outweigh the return of Jesus. Maybe you don't think this is sad. Look at it this way: this world, the home you have now and the family in it and all your friends at school is not really our home. Peter makes this clear in his letter: "Beloved, I urge as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul" (1 Peter 2:11). What two things did Peter call us?...Sojourners and exiles. The NIV translates this section as "aliens and strangers." C.S. Lewis helps explain this strange analogy, "If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world." One of the greatest temptations of the enemy is to make this feel like home, our last chance for happiness. However, God knows this and He counteracts it with discontentment and emptiness when we make our life in this world into an idol, and a deep desire for something this world can't offer. Our time on earth has been compared to many things, but my favorite is to a shadow (C.S. Lewis strikes again). It is in the image of something great, but it isn't quite enough. We want the real thing, and one day we will have it. Let's take a few minutes today and everyday the rest of this week and think about how amazing the day will be when we will be reunited with God for forever. When there will be no more pain, sadness, loneliness, suicided, depression, anger, violence, abortion, etc. When we will live in perfect communion with God and with others. My wish is we will all dream about our real home, and in dreaming for it desire it above everything else. And because of that we will be like the child alien and ask our Dad, "Are we going home?"