Homesick for Heaven Revelation 14:13; 21 :9-22:7 D o YOU RECALL your first experience of being away from home at Christmas? Do you remember the paroxysm of pain which seized you as you thought back on home and loved ones? If your experience was similar to multitudes of others it was a gnawing feeling of indescribable homesickness and dreadful loneliness. You went back over memory's highway to the familiar scenes about your natal fireside. You could picture your father and mother and all the family seated around a festive table ladened with delectable food such as only your mother could prepare. As you thought on that familiar scene, far from home and loved ones, you would have given a "king's ran som" to be back there and participate in the happy event. You may have attempted to erase the joyful occasion from your mind, but to no avail. An awful ache and sorrow of soul overwhelmed you as you brushed a tear from your eye. No other experience quite compares to homesickness on the first Christmas away from home. Christ and Christmas Have you ever paused to consider what the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ as a baby in a manger at Bethlehem implies? That was His first Christmas away from His home in heaven. The tragedy was not in the fact that there was no room for Him in the Inn at Bethlehem, rather that His "room in heaven" was vacant. It was not the surrounding dreariness of the stable that gave His birth a tragic note, but the absence of that joy He had known in His Father's House. It was 3
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