On one of my many trips home, I was flagged down at a ‘drive and revive’ stop point. I was handed a cup of tea through my open window and the gentleman who gave it to me asked courteously, “Where are you going, Ma’am?”
My thank-you smile broadened, “I’m going home!” I declared emphatically, having been away with work for a week.
Home is where we walk in the door feeling “it’s good to be home”. There is an atmosphere there. It is where we are with people who reflect the same atmosphere, it is where we are accepted. It is where we live by the household rules and we follow them almost by instinct because they have been written into us from childhood.
It is where we are in the company of those who have similar ideals and give time to each other. We do our tasks and meet regularly either over a meal or when the week’s work is done and we can take time just for ourselves.
We live comfortably inside the home circle when we live within the household boundaries. When we go outside the boundaries, we have a lingering unease.
Long after I was married and had many loyalties and others to love, I still loved to go home, because going home is always in the context of a place to live, rules to live by, and others who are of the same basic mind.
So if ever I should go home and my Father should say to me, “do you love me with all your heart and mind and strength?” I would say, with good Australian emphasis, “You bet I do!”
My Father would never demand love without the context of a place to live and rules to live by. And isn’t that exactly what our God did when he established our context and met with us in the evening where, “they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day”? (Genesis 3:8)
And isn’t it exactly what he was talking about where he said, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your strength”?
This is found in the Old Testament, Deut. 6:5, and Jesus quotes it in Matt. 22:37, also saying that everything else hinges on love to God and treating your neighbour as yourself. The ideal house rules are rules of love.
You see God knows exactly how we feel because he created us to feel that way. He created us under an everlasting covenant and home was not an accident going somewhere to happen. It was made for habitation and had everything we needed in the company it provided, the food we ate and the surrounds we enjoyed.
It had colour and song, and yes, even laughter because the Kookaburras were there and their laughter is loud and often. They are in the garden around me and I know the sound of their personal chatter to each other, of their call to me when they want food, and of their exuberant outbursts of laughter. They put a smile on my face.
Colour in its varying shades was there in plenty in the pinks, reds, blues and greens of birds’ feathers, and in vegetation, in trees and crops in flower, as well as in all creatures. Then every living creature was given blessing and jurisdiction and told to multiply in their kinds.
Man and woman were brought into this planned home, given blessing and authority, and even more, the opportunity to meet and talk with the planner.
It was all legal and binding, no trespassing, and God refers to the whole plan as ‘The Everlasting Covenant.’ He made the covenant before he made man and even angels were not involved so when Adam and Eve went outside the covenant and lost the ‘image of God’ they put God’s plan under threat and so they lost the ability to live in that perfect environment.
After the plan came under further threat from a destroying flood, God put up the rainbow as the symbol to himself and to Noah.
To Noah it was a symbol of a covenant that the earth would never again be under total, wipe-out flood, but to God the rainbow was a symbol of a covenant made by God with God, – Father, Creator and Holy Spirit.
Even if mankind should rebel and betray again as they did in the beginning, Genesis 3, and prior to the flood, (Genesis, Genesis 6), the rainbow would remind God of his original ideal to make man like himself and give him a perfect home.
The rainbow guarantees it. When God looked at the rainbow he said, “I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.” (Genesis 9:16).
God shares his thoughts with us so that we also will remember the everlasting covenant.
When somebody asks you courteously as you pause at a “drive and revive” station, “where are you going?”
I hope you smile and reply, “I am Homeward Bound”!
Elizabeth Price
Please join us next Thursday for Homeward Bound, Part 2.
(To access the other parts of the “Homeward Bound” mini-series, please click here.)