by Eugene Higgins
Repatriation and Home
While most of us are at least in our own homes, there are many people still stranded in foreign lands. This has created a need for what are called “Repatriation Flights,” special charter flights organized by governments in order to bring citizens back to their country of origin. (For Americans, these special flights are organized by the U.S. Department of State — Bureau of Consular Affairs). These special flights can be very expensive – more than $1,000 per passenger, even for relatively short flights. Long-haul flights can be even more expensive. For example, seats on a repatriation flight from San Salvador to Houston were selling for $1,197 at the end of March 2020. This type of flight is not something new. In 2019, the U.K. operated its largest peacetime repatriation program ever when Thomas Cook abruptly ceased operations, leaving British citizens stranded around the world. The two-week operation, dubbed “Operation Matterhorn,” (who thinks up these names?) brought 150,000 passengers home.
“Home” is a wonderful word; it has been described as one of the greatest in the English language; “a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.” No doubt we are all aware of the play on words in Paul’s message to the Corinthians (2 Co 5:6-8): “Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord … We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present (at home) with the Lord.” Delightfully, he uses the same base word for “at home,” “absent,” and “present,” merely changing their meanings by use of a prefix. The word for “at home” and “present,” is “endemeo” and the word for absent (both times) is “ekdemeo.” Thayer defines the Greek word for “at home” as “to be among one’s own people, dwell in one’s own country.” One day, perhaps very soon, you are going to be among your own people. You are going to be home.
Someone has said that the surest way to be identified as a visitor (a person away from home) is by standing on a street in places like Chicago and New York City, staring up at the towering heights of the Sears Tower or the Empire State Building. These sites are “old hat” to locals; so anyone awed by them is more than likely a visitor. And in one sense, an identifying feature of our life, setting us apart from those of this world, should be that we are looking up. Lest someone trots out the tired old aphorism that one can be “so heavenly-minded as to be of no earthly good,” I would suggest that few of us are in danger of being overly heavenly-minded. It was one of the busiest and most productive of the Lord’s servants who wrote, “For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Php 3:20). His words challenge each of us – are we actually, (not merely theologically), looking for the Savior? Does it take a virus and the collapse of an economy to loosen our grip on “things” and lift our thoughts heavenward?
Having recovered the truth of the Rapture and end time events, believers more than a century and a half ago rejoiced to think that Heaven was their home. In fact, prophecy was so much a part of assembly testimony and life that one famous Baptist preacher half-mockingly said of believers in one assembly, “Ye men of Plymouth, why stand ye gazing up into Heaven?” Yet, these believers who were “gazing up into Heaven” founded orphanages, evangelized communities, sent out missionaries, helped educate children in Sunday schools, and accomplished so much more that honored God and aided mankind. Not so shabby for “heavenly-minded” people!
Have you seen pictures of airports, highways, and city streets recently? Absent from long corridors at airports are vendors, travelers, and officials. Missing from wide city streets and pavements are cars, buses, taxis, pedestrians. I-480 in California, usually resembling a parking lot, looks more like a runway at LAX, except that LAX now looks more like a parking lot. The absence of human life in some towns has led to the encroachment of wild animals. Online videos of mountain goats coming into town and eating shrubbery in front of houses, of boars running through streets, and of cougars prowling around towns remind us that there is a very thin barrier separating human life and “wildlife.” While it reminds me of the words in that hodgepodge of a hymn, “The King is Coming,” (“the marketplace is empty, no more traffic in the streets,” etc.), some believers have said it is like getting a preview of how things will look down here immediately after the rapture.
But think of how things will look up there immediately after the rapture, when we are “caught up to meet the Lord in the air.” We are told that “we shall see Him as He is”; that “we shall be like Him”; that “so shall we ever be with the Lord.” The Savior said He was coming back so that “Where I am, there ye may be also.” The Shepherd Who found us as lost sheep, Who saved us and put us on His shoulders, has a goal in mind for His sheep: “When He cometh home, He calleth together His friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with Me; for I have found My sheep which was lost” (Luke 15:6). He is carrying us Home.
I know that, as Paul Harvey once said, “In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these.“ But even if this is no more than a temporary hiccup in the history of the planet, it cannot hurt us to occupy our minds more with Heaven than we have. We are heading home; and, no matter what the future holds, we likely are heading home far sooner than we think. It might be nice if other people pegged us as strangers and pilgrims because we were so frequently looking up!
Stuart K. Hine, who served the Lord in Western Ukraine, heard the Russian version of the Swedish hymn, “How Great Thou Art,” and translated it into English. He and his wife were working among displaced Eastern Europeans who were forced to return to their homelands because of World War II. Those whom the Hines were trying to help would incessantly ask, “When are we going home?” “What about home?” “When will we be able to go home?” With those questions almost constantly in his mind, Stuart Hine added a verse to the wonderful hymn,
“When Christ shall come, with shouts of acclamation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart!
Then I shall bow in humble adoration
And there proclaim, “My God, how great Thou art!”
Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee,
How great Thou art! How great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee,
How great Thou art! How great Thou art!”
“For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven” (2Co 5:1, 2). Because we are born from above, and because God is our “Eternal Father,” we are going not only to our fatherland, but to the Father’s land. You, dear child of God, are going to be part of the greatest “repatriation” in history; You are going home.
“Land of Immanuel, thou art home to me, because the Lord is there.
It is a foreign land where He is not, however sweet and fair.
As nearer to thy shores I draw each day, earth’s lights grow yet more dim;
Soon shall I scale those shining heights of bliss and be for aye with Him.”