Down to Earth

Have you ever thought about where the phrase “down to earth” came from? We English-speakers use it as an idiom to express the idea that someone is relatable, humble, accessible, not snooty or conceited or aloof. But it hit me the other day that the meaning behind the phrase could have come from the life of Someone who literally came down to Earth and was relatable, humble, and accessible despite having all the right in the universe to stand aloof. You might have an idea of who I’m talking about. But how did I start thinking about this in the first place? Let me back up and tell you a story…

In the last ten months of living in the Middle East, I’ve lost count of the number of times people have expressed amazement or confusion at the fact that my husband and I are living here instead of in America. The locals especially find it hard to fathom that someone from one of the freest countries on earth would leave all that behind and live under occupation, with all the difficulties and inconveniences such a life brings. I usually tell people how God has helped me and prepared me to live here, how life in America is no utopia despite the fact many people think of it as heaven, and how contentment in life doesn’t come from where you live; it comes from having a relationship with Jesus. All of that is very much true. But there’s also another reason I chose to move to my husband’s city in the Middle East: because I love him.

Truth be told, he has been one of the major instruments God has used to prepare me for life here. His patient and tireless explaining of everything foreign, his encouragement as I learn and try new things, his understanding when my brain has reached its limit for the day, his determination to find random items at the grocery store so I can cook a favorite meal—with all of these, he has made the adjustment so much easier.

But there are some things outside of his control. He can’t change the fact that we must be cognizant of how many appliances we have running at one time so the power doesn’t go out. He can’t change the fact that we can’t throw toilet paper in the toilet because the plumbing can’t handle it (although, to be honest, that’s really not that bad once you get used to it). He can’t change the fact that we can’t go visit one of the most famous cities in the world even though it’s less than ten miles from us because I haven’t been issued a permit. He can’t change the fact that we drive by multiple armed soldiers on our way to visit his grandparents. He can’t change the fact that we often have to cancel plans or change travel routes because of the latest round of unrest. He can’t change the fact that the process to travel is exhausting and frustrating and unnecessarily time-consuming and often dehumanizing. And the fact that I have to experience these things that have characterized the majority of his life sometimes weighs heavily on him.

“I’m sorry you have to go through this,” he will say. But I hold him and tell him the truth: “You’re worth it.” No, living here is not always easy, especially as an American who has freedom and equal protection under the law running in her veins. Sometimes it’s downright infuriating. But getting to be his wife and live alongside him and understand his lifelong experience in a deeper way, even if only partially, is worth all the difficulties. I can face them because of my God-given love for him.

I’ve often heard it said that when you become a parent you start to have a deeper understanding of the way in which God loves you as His child. As Jesus said, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11, ESV). The experience of parenting and unconditionally loving a child gives us a glimpse of the unconditional love that God has for His children.

In the same way, I’ve found that my experience of leaving my relatively comfortable life in America and moving to a place where I have to worry about concrete walls and checkpoints and permits and soldiers, the process of entering into the world of people I love, to live among them as they live and to be considered one of them, has given me a deeper understanding of the sacrifice Jesus made by becoming incarnate. He left the completely perfect realm of Heaven, the only actual utopia, and came literally and figuratively down to Earth to live among us as we live and to be one of us.

A Being who was self-sufficient, He made Himself dependent. A Being who was self-sustaining, He subjected Himself to hunger and thirst. An all-powerful Being who never slumbers or sleeps, He inhabited a body that became tired and sleepy. The Being who designed the human body and created its process of development, He willingly entered a womb and experienced being physically born. A Being who was omnipresent, He experienced the physical limitations of humanity that require travel to be in a different place and prevent being in multiple places at once.

The Word of God made Himself a child who had to learn to speak. The Light of the World entered a world that became dark every evening. The Prince of Peace came to dwell in a land of unrest. The King of Kings became a common carpenter. The Just Judge subjected Himself to a system of injustice. Jesus, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8, ESV).

Why? Because He loved us. Because the world and all of creation needed to be set right. Because our relationship to Him, to ourselves, to each other, and to nature needed to be healed and restored. He could have left us to our own ruin, but He loved us. He could have given up on us and destroyed us like we deserve, but He loved us. He could have avoided the inconveniences and difficulties of life as a human, but He loved us. He could have escaped the suffering and pain He endured from living and dying in this fallen world, but He loved us.

So He came. Down to Earth. He lived how we lived; He worked how we worked; He felt how we felt; He walked how we walked and traveled how we traveled; He sweat how we sweat and toiled how we toiled; He ate how we ate, drank how we drank, slept how we slept, and cried how we cried; He was “tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15, ESV). And all because He loved us. “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly,” and this was the culmination of the plan to show His and the Father’s love (Romans 5:6, 8 ESV).

What a deep, abiding, perfect love that Jesus Christ has for us. Because of this love, it is possible for us to go from being enemies to children of God (see 1 John 3:1). That the Supreme God of the universe would love us so much that He would willingly identify with us, live among us, and become one of us, even while we were rebelling against Him—what an awe-inspiring thought. That He would care enough about us to understand our struggles and the difficulties of our situation, not only intellectually from being all-knowing but experientially from enduring them Himself—what a mind-blowing realization. What beautiful, wondrous love!

PC: Cheri Moore. Used with permission.

A Heart for Home

The idea of home is one that has captivated humanity for ages and not surprisingly, since a heart that longs for home is a feature of the design God created in us. We’ve reflected this longing by writing songs and stories, developing clichés, creating décor, all dedicated to this idea of belonging, of attachment to a place. The idea is so ingrained in us that one of the first things we typically ask when getting to know someone is, “Where are you from?” which is another way of saying, “Where is your home?”

For those of us who have moved around a lot, that can be a confusing question. Is home where I was born? Is it where I grew up? Is it where I currently live? Is it where my family lives? Is it where my family roots are? Is it the place to which I feel most attached? For many, myself included, those can all be different places. So which one is home? I recently went “home” (to the United States) to visit my “home” (my parents’ house where I used to live) and my other “home” (the town and house where I grew up) before returning “home” to the Middle East where my husband and I currently live.

In the weeks leading up to and during that trip, my thoughts were often turned to the idea of home, and I realized that the answer to all those questions above is “yes.” All of those places are home, because all of those places are part of me, and I was part of them. The saying “Home is where the heart is” is more than just a cliché. It’s reflective of the truth that our home is the place where we make memories and/or where our affection lies and/or where we find belonging. It is possible, then, to have many homes. And because we are finite creatures who are only able to physically be in one place at a time, that multi-home reality means that we are destined for a life of being home while simultaneously missing home.

In some ways, I think I expected that with each passing move my earlier places of residence would lose some of their hold on me, but that has not been the case. The only thing that has changed each time is that I then have more places to miss. It turns out the heart is not some box that only fits so many things inside. It keeps growing to hold all the people and places that one finds dear, and while that is a beautiful thing, in some ways the thought of it can be exhausting. It means that in all likelihood my husband and I will always live in a different country than at least one set of our parents. It means that the longing I have for all my homes will never go away, and I’ll only get more longings for more places the more I move around. It means the longing I have for face-to-face time with all my friends from all those homes will never go away, and I’ll only have more friends to miss the more I leave one home for the next.

To be clear, I’m not complaining. Having many homes and many friends is a blessing beyond measure. To put a spin on Tennyson, ‘tis better to have family and friends far away than never to have had family or friends at all. What I am doing, though, is acknowledging that sometimes being far away from home just plain hurts. But as I was thinking about this perpetual longing the other day, the Lord reminded me that these longings are reflective of a greater longing. They are echoes meant to point me to something else, to another home, the ultimate Home that I have waiting for me thanks to Jesus.

As C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” The desire for home is one such unsatiable, otherworldly desire. Even if you’re enjoying being in one home, you’re always missing the others. Even in moments of happiness, there is often still the sense that something or someone is missing. But the prospect of a persistent ache from being absent from loved ones and dear places is not something to be overwhelmed by. Instead, it is a gift, because it reminds me that one day I will be fully Home and missing and longing and aching will be no more. And it’s a gift because in reminding me of these things it points me to Jesus.

While I was home in the States with all these things in the back of my mind, I had one of those moments where I was reading a familiar passage of Scripture only to have the Holy Spirit emphasize verses I hadn’t usually focused on before. The passage was Hebrews 11, and I was struck by the ways the chapter speaks to this idea of leaving home to go to a new home while simultaneously longing for our ultimate home.

In verse 8 we read, “By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going” (ESV). Abraham is called by God to leave his home, to leave the place where he grew up, the place where his family lived, and go to a new home. And he goes. “By faith he went to live in the land of promise,” (v. 9). But interestingly it doesn’t say that he made it his new home, even though it’s where he lived out the rest of his life. Verse 9 continues, saying he went to live “as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise.”  Why? “For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God” (v. 10). God had promised him a new earthly home, yet his eyes weren’t focused on that new home; they were focused on his eternal home.

No doubt, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob wanted to settle down in their new home and have the longing of the promise fulfilled in their lifetimes, but instead, “These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland” (vv. 13-14). As these verses point out, if we saw someone neglecting to put down roots in a new place, we might assume that they intended to return home.

But Abraham and Sarah weren’t focused on their former earthly home any more than they were focused on their new one (which, as we’ve seen, wasn’t a lot). “If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return” (v. 15). Instead, their longing for home was pointed elsewhere. “But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city” (v. 16). No doubt, they missed their family and the familiarity of their earlier home; no doubt they would have liked to feel completely settled and at home in their new land, but their desire for their future home, their heavenly home, was greater.

While we may have many earthly homes, the truth is that none of them are truly our home. None of them are where we truly belong. None of them are where our greatest affection lies. None of them are the place where we can most completely be ourselves. None of them are where we were designed and created to live for eternity. So while we absolutely can and should love where we live and have lived and recognize them all as gifts that God has sovereignly used as parts of our story, and while we certainly can feel the pain of missing people and places that comes from being absent from those things that we love, we should also recognize, as Abraham and Sarah and C. S. Lewis did, that our homeland is in another world.  And we can let that truth wash over us with all of its refreshing, hopeful promise whenever the longing for our other homes presses heavily on our hearts.

Because one day all our other homes will pass away and our new home will arrive, “coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband,” and we will know not only intellectually but experientially with every fiber of our being that “‘the dwelling place of God is with man,’” because “‘He will dwell with [us], and [we] will be his people, and God himself will be with [us] as [our] God.’” And “‘He will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’ And he who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true’” (Revelation 21:1-6, ESV).  

PC: Penny Eanes. Used with permission.

P.S. As often happens, when there is a theme of thought during a particular period of my life, references to that theme will pop up from seemingly random places. Several days ago, as the beginnings of this blog post were rolling around in my head, The Foreign Landers (a band I follow made up of a fellow alum of my college and his wife) released a new song partially inspired by the very C.S. Lewis quote I mentioned above. It speaks of the longing that serves as a reflection of our ultimate home. Please take a moment to listen and be encouraged: https://fb.watch/eF_VaLtUMx/ (no Facebook account needed to view). I’d recommend listening twice so you can most fully grasp the meaning of all the lyrics.