My son works in the international office of a university, helping with students who are visiting from other countries. Recently when he was at the airport picking up some incoming students, a young woman from Sweden told him that she was returning home on the next flight. She had suddenly realized just how far from home she really was.
"Home" is a place where one feels secure, surrounded by loved ones.
I once had an experience where all the excitement and anticipation of my new adventure went right out the window once the realization hit me that I was a long way from home. I had an opportunity to go to Seattle, Washington, from my home in the Midwest. The plan was to spend a week there, take the train to Portland, Oregon, for a stopover, and then catch the train back home. After arriving in Seattle, however, I was utterly miserable. All I could think of was that I was 2,000 miles from home and nobody really knew where I was.
The whole experience soon turned around, though. Before I left for Seattle, my mother had asked me to give her regards to a friend who had formerly lived in our city. When I went to visit with my mother's friend, she sensed I was feeling homesick, although she didn't tell me this at the time. This woman was a spiritual healer—a Christian Science practitioner—and was thinking of me as God's loved child, not as an unhappy young woman far from home. Whether I realized it at the time or not, her thought about me as God's child—not affected by being temporarily outside my familiar surroundings—was helping me already.
One day I decided to go to the Christian Science Reading Room in Seattle to have a quiet place to think and pray. On my way out, I stopped to admire some flowers on the attendant's desk. She told me they had been given to her because her sister was ill. Then, with the most loving look on her face, she said something I've never forgotten: "You know, God is just pouring forth His love so abundantly every single moment, if we would just look up and accept it." I walked out onto the steep hills of downtown Seattle thinking of those words:
"God is just pouring forth His love." Then I stopped right in the middle of the street. "If this is true," I thought, "then God's love is abundant this very moment, and all I have to do is accept it."
I was 2000 miles away from home—but God was with me.
Then I had a mental image of Niagara Falls. Just as nothing could stop it from pouring forth, nothing could stop God's love from pouring out to me and everyone else. I knew in a profound way that I was God's child, loved by Him and having all the good that He was giving me.
I decided that I was going to see everyone I met along the way in this same light. From that moment on I began to "walk in the Spirit" (see Gal. 5:16, 25), as St. Paul puts it, conscious every moment that I was God's beloved child. As a result, my whole approach changed. Instead of a week's vacation, I ended up extending my time away to three weeks, traveling to California and even to Texas, before finally making my way home.
This great realization—as well my decision to act on it in my responses to other people—was the understanding that I had, in a sense, never really left home. Knowing that I was the beloved child of God, I would always experience His goodness.
San Marcos, Texas
