Home again

It had been a while since I had visited. The trip back had been filled with a torrent of memories and as the crest of the hill disappeared before me the remembering became vivid, almost visible. My mother and father, those early times together in love and caring ignited feeling of life lessons learned, and an unexplainable feeling of connection to another time and place. It was a different place than I was seeing in memory. The buildings were gone and none of the physical signs that a farm had ever been there remained, except for a few abnormal mounds and depression that gave faint impressions of human touch. Yet through my mind’s eye something else appeared. The places that I had experienced and written on my heart years earlier sprang to life as a vision in the mist. I was home again.


Fortune and G-d’s favor allowed for a recent visit to Israel as part of the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations’ conference and tour. Schedule did not permit a lot of thought or expectation building. I just didn’t have the luxury of spending much time thinking about it, therefore the journey to Eretz Israel came without much expectation. However, I did have my mental picture gleaned from reading scripture, hearing sermons, and seeing travel logs. In my mind it was a broad and vast land filled with palm trees, mountains, quiet pools, and people in bathrobes. It was a spiritual storybook land that had been the place of parables, history, and G-d’s presence. The flight there did little to change these pre-conceptions and was not much more than a succession of small seats, bad food, and waiting for something to happen. Though presenting an extraordinary blend of modern and historic imagery, the Tel Aviv airport did little to arouse anything other than “what’s next?”


Then to the bus and out into “the land.” It was on the bus, within the first half hour, that I began to feel the “crest of the hill” feeling of coming home that quite frankly surprised me. How could I feel like I’m coming home to a place that I had never been and have only thin ancestral connection? This just didn’t make sense. But in spite of what my mind continued to remind me of, my heart did not listen. The longer I was in the land the more feelings of being “home again” kept growing. As I finally yielded to G-d’s attempt to get my attention, the mental realization of this not only being the homeland of the Jewish people, but the homeland of every believer began to unveil itself in consciousness. I knew this place, though skewed in interpretation. It was the place where water had been turned to wine, where people had been raised from the dead, and where G-d’s presence had been revealed. The storybook land turned into the mounds and depressions that gave vivid impressions of G-d’s touch and an unexplainable feeling of connection to another time and place. The Negev, the Sea of Galilee, Capernaum, and on and on pealed scale after scale from my spiritual eyes to reveal the simple fact that this was G-d’s “home town.” This is a place where, as believers, we have in our hearts all visited. I was home again.