In this book of devotional reflections, Kate Motaung invites adults on all walks of life to set their hope on heaven. When so many things on earth are competing for your attention, Motaung's devotional encourages you to meditate on your eternal home with Jesus in heaven.

Defining Home

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.”

Revelation 21:3 ESV

Where is home for you?

I posed this question to members of my Bible study group in South Africa. Going around the circle, I was surprised to learn that only two people out of twelve considered Cape Town, the “Mother City” of South Africa, to be their home. One named Namibia as her home; another was from the States; several counted the Eastern Cape of South Africa as home for them.

But nobody in the group—nobody—responded with the word “heaven” as their home.

Ask twelve people to define home, and you will get twelve very different answers. Admittedly, I probably even have twelve different definitions of my own when it comes to my personal perception of home.

There are my childhood memories of home, my at- tempts to establish a home away from home as a new bride, and the current state of chaos that my kids refer to as home.

It’s relative, this notion of home.

Not just any feather pillow, but my feather pillow. The one that lulled me to sleep each night as a young girl on the bottom bunk, body wrapped in a cocoon of untucked flannel sheets.

Not just any dining room table, but our dining room table. The polished mahogany that we annually blanketed with flour and massaged year after year with wooden rolling pins as we flattened and reshaped mounds of refrigerated Christmas cookie dough.

That patch on the bike path where I biffed on a stick while rollerblading, resulting in my inability to button my jeans for a week due to the bruised, swollen hip bone I had pocketed as a souvenir. That patch on the beach where we used to spread our towels in the dark, lie on our backs with hands folded behind our heads, and breathe in the midsummer meteor showers with oohs and aahs. That patch in the yard where the grass grew untamed in a perfect circle, sheltered by the trampoline under which we hid when the purple martins dive-bombed us in defense of their newly hatched young.

Saturday morning waffles with boysenberry syrup. Hudsonville ice cream. Dad’s chop suey. Mom’s chocolate chip cookies.

These things, for me, encompass home.

But there’s more.

There has to be.

Home cannot be thirty-year-old bunk beds, because not only do I no longer sleep there, but my boys have outgrown them too. And while we are still blessed to shower the aging mahogany table with pencil shavings and eraser scraps, the Lord knows that the Christmas cookies and tubs of Hudsonville ice cream don’t last longer than the blink of an eye. The Rollerblades that were precarious then would be a death wish now, and the rusty springs of the trampoline disintegrated a lifetime ago.

Things change. Life moves on. Stuff breaks, gets thrown away, disappears.

There has to be more.

What defines home for you?

Is it a specific structure, a farmhouse that has been in the family for generations? Is it a region, a broader area like the East Coast of the US or the Eastern Cape of South Africa, that encompasses home for you?

Or, like the Church, is it not about the building at all, but about the people? Are you one who is able to uproot and replant just about anywhere, and still call it “home” because of the loved ones who surround you?

Perhaps the most important question is this: How can we change our thinking in a way that will elevate heaven to the top of our list when we think of home?

In this book, we’ll explore several components of the eternal home of the believer in Christ: how we pursue it, how we can prepare for it, how we get there, how our hearts are entwined in it, how we hunger for it, and what it will be like when we arrive. My greatest hope is that each of us will be edified and encouraged to set our minds on things above and live each day in the hope of eternity, to the glory of God.

Question for Reflection

What defines home for you?