It’s a strange feeling—going back to a place after not being there for a long time.
Sometimes, the place has changed. Sometimes, you’ve changed. Sometimes, it’s a little of both. It feels like you’re meeting a stranger, but somehow it’s a stranger you’ve known for a very long time.
That’s how I felt last May, going left at the fork onto a familiar tree-lined road right outside Pittsfield, Massachusetts. We were in a beautiful region of New England known as the Berkshires. Just beyond the trees, I saw it. The little yellow house.
It was the same… and yet it was so different.
I spent many happy days at that little yellow house in Western Massachusetts. Just about every summer of my childhood, we loaded up in our twelve-passenger van and made the trek. It took us twelve hours from Virginia. When we lived in Tennessee, it took us two days.
But the feeling of stepping out of the van after that marathon of a trip, breathing in the fresh piney air, walking up those three wooden steps to the front door, pushing aside the screen, and giving Grandma and Grandpa a big hug in the breezeway…
I don’t know how to tell you what it felt like.
We’d spend our days swimming in the pool, trekking through the woods looking for blueberries and black raspberries and adventure. There was a little brook back in those woods. There was even a tiny cave up in the mountains. At least we called it a cave. It was just big enough that you could crawl through on your knees and elbows.
We’d work in Grandma and Grandpa’s garden, weeding and picking rhubarb and wax beans. Grandma would make strawberry rhubarb pie and we’d have the wax beans with dinner. Somehow they taste so much better when you pick them yourself. Everything tasted better at Grandma’s. Maybe it was because she tried to let us eat whatever we wanted. But I think there was something in the air—maybe it was the feeling of being completely carefree—that lent its own flavor to everything we ate.
In the evenings, we’d often go to the fire pit to roast marshmallows and make s’mores and Grandpa would make up stories. He had nonsense names for all of us and he’d talk about the imaginary adventures we had. Whenever we shucked corn, my grandpa would put the corn silk under his nose and pretend it was a mustache. When he told a joke, it was just funnier. I thought my grandfather was, hands down, the funniest person in all the world.
If I had tried to picture what Heaven would be like if I designed it, I would have had a hard time improving on that small yellow house in the Berkshires.
Sure it only had one bathroom and no AC. Sure the water in the pool was often too frigid for anyone in their right mind to want to swim. But to me, it was perfect.
Last May, we pull into the driveway and those feelings come flooding back. It’s the same old house and it’s painted the same old honey-butter yellow. But the pool is gone now. And so are Grandma and Grandpa.
We’re here for Grandma’s funeral. It’s quite the reunion. Over the next few days, we reunite with family members I haven’t seen in decades—cousins and second cousins we used to play with as kids who now have families and lives of their own, just like me.
But I don’t kid myself. It’s not “just like the good old days”. This place hasn’t changed too much, but I have. I don’t bother hiking back to visit the brook or look for berries. I don’t stress about the fact that we don’t get to sit around the fire pit and tell stories. Wax beans aren’t on the menu.
And that’s ok because as much as I’m tempted to try, I know it would be foolish to try to recreate my childhood. Those days are gone, and they’re not coming back.
And that has to be ok.
That was last May. This May, we just got back from a trip. We visited my in-laws at their farm in middle-of-nowhere Indiana. It’s nice going up there. I enjoy the chance to relax and unwind.
But I’ve realized something is happening. That small brown house on the farm is becoming, for my kids, what the small yellow house was for me. We have to drive for what seems like an eternity to get there but once we’re there, everything is magical. They get to ride tractors and four-wheelers, and fish in the pond, and play baseball in the yard, and play outdated video games. The food tastes better at Grandma’s. It makes me happy to see it happening—to see that place becoming such a special place for my kids. It also makes me feel a little like a kid again myself.
We’re planning another trip up to western Massachusetts next year. It’ll be fun. We’ll get to see family and reminisce, but after last year’s trip, I understand something about that small yellow house in the Berkshires.
The house is pretty much the same, but that place is gone forever.
Jesus’s time on earth is drawing to a close. He has a certain urgency to prepare his followers for what is coming. One thing He knows they will need in the dark days to come is hope.
He tells them, “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.” (John 14:1)
He wants their hope to be focused on Him. But He goes on to say, “I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.” (John 14:2-4)
Thomas is confused. He tells Jesus he doesn’t know where Jesus is going or how to get there.
Jesus responds, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” (John 14:6)
Ever since the beginning, mankind has yearned for a place. Hebrews 11 tells us that Abraham searched for “a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” (Hebrews 11:10)
We long for a place… a place where we can rest, where we can find joy, a place that is perfectly HOME. Much of the story of the Old Testament centers around the Israelites finding their God-given place, then losing it, and then getting it back. Places have a lot of power.
I love my house. It’s so comfortable and relaxing and it truly feels like home. I love my church. It just feels right to be there, surrounded by Christian brothers and sisters, singing and praying and preaching and eating and laughing. But there’s something inside me that yearns for something else—something more—something kind of like that small yellow house in Massachusetts.
C. S. Lewis writes in his book Mere Christianity, “Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy.”
To quote another great philosopher of our age, “There’s no place like home.”
Our hearts yearn for home, but not just a home on earth, a home that is perfectly home. A home that is everything that even the best home on earth can never be.
My Grandma’s funeral service was a bit like the large Catholic church where it was held—echoey and majestic and mostly empty. It made me yearn for something—something with substance, something that brought me face-to-face with the realities of eternity. I wanted to be reminded that there is a place beyond this earth, a place where those who believe in Jesus will be at home forever.
My family and I sang a song at the close of the funeral. We sang about hope, hope in Christ—the only One who can bring back things that are gone, the One who is preparing that place for His followers.
Just like Jesus Himself, His place is perfect. He holds the keys and He is the Way.
Lewis says, “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.”
I think I’m beginning to understand why people long for Heaven more as they get older. They say it’s because they want to be free from the aches and pains of the body, but I think it’s something more than that. I think it’s because they have known the power of good places, places filled with the warmth of home, places that fill and overfill the heart with joy, but they know that some of those places are gone forever.
They long for a place—a city built by God—that can be finally, truly home.
I’m grateful for that small yellow house nestled among the mountains of western Massachusetts. I’m grateful for the memories. But I’m even more grateful for the reminder it will always be that my hope… and my home… are not of this world.
There is a perfect place, but it’s not in Massachusetts, or Virginia, or Indiana.
It’s in Heaven.
Exempla 