"Heaven is My Home"

"I am a stranger in the earth: hide not thy commandments from me." (Psalms 119:19)

 As to the vertical living, this is one of those verses that speaks powerfully into that direction. In this, we are merely here for a very short season; regardless of what your circumstances might be, you are not going through them for a very long time. It might seem like it is forever, but as time will tell, your life is like a vapor: "It appears for a little time, and then vanishes away." (James 4:14) Even still, this life can be overwhelming at times. The simple life we might have hoped for, it is not as simple as we thought. Between family matters and the struggle to pay the bills, things can distract us from the way we should be living and make us focus more on the horizontal living than on the vertical life we should be focused on. Storing out treasure up in heaven is not the same as putting money into a retirement account; we must be passionate about our home! This is not our home, this is only a temporary place where we can be used of God and be ambassadors for Jesus Christ. I really do not have much authority here to talk, because my life is surely not one to model after if you are looking for a witness of being focused upon heaven. As a matter of fact, my life is pretty busy with just keeping up; between working on my business about at 64 hours a week, taking care of Marianne for at least 120 hours, and spending at least 17 hours a week doing this blog, 168 hours a week gets stretched to at least 200; so who has time focus upon heaven? I'm just glad the radio station has been restored, so that I can listen to CSN while driving from appointment to appointment. By the way, I heard Dr. Chuck speaking about Mark yesterday, and he was saying exactly the same thing I said a few years back; that Mark was most likely the Rich Young Ruler, and that he was also the young man wrapped in the sheet from Mark 14:51-52. So, even though I might be a stranger in the earth, God's word is not a stranger in me; even if I might sometimes seem strange...

"While we live in these earthly bodies, we groan and sigh, but it's not that we want to die and get rid of these bodies that clothe us. Rather, we want to put on our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life. God himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee he has given us his Holy Spirit. So we are confident, even though we know that as long as we live in these bodies we are not at home with the Lord. For we live by believing and not by seeing." (2 Corinthians 5:4-7) NLT