Are You At Home with Your Passport? 

I checked again to make sure the blue passport lay in my palm. Lines of weary travelers stretched long behind and in front of us. In tightly clasped fists, passports of green, maroon, and brown blurred with our shuffling. They were irreplaceable identifications of citizenships from around the globe.

We shoved suitcases with a knee, pulled one from behind, and moved with the tired flow. Slightly dazed and starry eyed jet-lagged parents juggled bewildered children in their arms and baggage at their feet.

Once upon a time, I was one of those harried moms with four jet-lagged children draped over our suitcases and carried against me. Was it just yesterday or perhaps eons ago?

“I don’t feel like I’m home. Not here, not there,” one of our daughters said after returning from a whirlwind US trip back to where she had grown up on Italy’s soil. Perhaps she felt it most, a belonging in bits and pieces, but not anywhere completely.

I felt her unmoored-ness as she turned her face toward me. Her blue eyes searched mine. Inside their liquid shine was a pleading for understanding, for help.

When my children were little, I worried about them passing through time zones, flying in and out of relationships, eating what was served and sleeping where they could. They were children of the globe with comings and goings of missionary life. Months dropped out of their lives in one country and popped up again in another place.

I often took comfort in Paul’s words when he penned Philippians 3:20, “For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ?”  (NASB).

As July 4 and the celebration of our country’s independence approaches, my mind rests on that citizenship beyond these earthly borders.

I live only a couple of miles from the once-upon-a-time home of Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and July 4 is a big day at Monticello.

The United State’s flag flies proudly, big and beautiful on the grounds. Every year on Independence Day new citizens of our great country are sworn in on the rolling green of its gardens. And the proud day reminds me again of my citizenship’s blessings.

Did you know that both Thomas Jefferson and his friend John Adams died on July 4, fifty years after they signed the document that changed history? Those were tumultuous times lived with purpose and passion, of men and women willing to lay down self for the kinship of freedom. 

Citizenship offers a certain kind of belonging, a rootedness, and although the debates have changed with history’s tide, it is still a big deal. And a great privilege. On the Fourth of July we remember that we owe our forefathers a debt of gratitude for the blue passports we carry and the liberty we enjoy. 

“My Kingdom is not of this world…” Jesus said in John 18:36. (NASB)

“… foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.” (Matthew 8:20 NASB). 

I remember how desperately I wanted my children to feel rooted, but I wonder if the uncomfortableness of our nomad missionary life was, in reality, a blessing. Maybe it was a constant reminder of our true home. Citizenship offers a certain kind of belonging, a rootedness, and although the debates have changed with history’s tide, it is still a big deal. Share on X

For surely, the Son of God, clothed with flesh, perfect in nature and King of a glorious, heavenly Home must have known the incongruence of uprootedness. As He walked the ground He created, breathed its air, and lived its inconveniences, did Jesus long for someplace not just to lay His head, but to be fully at Home?

I wonder how many around me are truly home, not born of a passport, but of the certainty of home in Christ.

“It’s not a good feeling,” I told my daughter way back when, “but it is a good thing to know that this is not our home.”

Because if we know we are not at home, perhaps we more readily find our dwelling place in a Person, rather than a location.

In the space of our un-rootedness Jesus finds His home.

“Where is your citizenship?” This is the heartbeat question Christ asks us.

Wherever I may be, my dwelling place is in Christ alone. And this is the mission of our very existence, to introduce and bring others into this place of Home which only Jesus offers.

And afterwards, when the tent of my body is packed away, my real home will not have moved. I will finally truly be where I belong. At home at last, alive as never before, with Jesus.

*Feature Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash