This World Is Not My Home

“How’re you doing these days?”

“Better above the ground than below it!”

Everyone chuckles.

If the second person in that conversation is a Christian, though, I have to wonder if they’ve fully researched their topic.

We used to sing a hymn that went, “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through … “ Have we forgotten that? I’m all for modern medicine and am amazed at some of the things doctors and nurses can do nowadays, but have we (or I, maybe I shouldn’t put this all on you) gotten so attached to holding onto this life that we forget not only that it’s temporary, but for the child of God, the next life is going to be way better?*

Hymns aren’t exactly canon, though, so think about what Paul said, “To live is Christ, to die is gain.” Paul wasn’t in a hurry to die. By that, I mean he wasn’t suddenly jumping into traffic or cutting his wrists with a pocket knife. But he was looking forward to heaven.

As a hospice chaplain, I’m around death all the time. Some people look at my job and say, “I couldn’t do that. It’d be too depressing.” (I usually think that about their jobs, too.) Sometimes it is depressing, but more often it’s not. It’s not all about loss. There are so many great moments where a family, even among their tears, can cheer a life well led, or rejoice in the fact that their loved one is now where they wanted to be (in heaven).

The saddest moments are when the person passes away and some family member (or maybe all of them) don’t know where she/he went. Did they go to heaven? Hell? Is there a heaven? I think the very saddest ones, at least for me, are those cases where the patient on hospice has a relationship with God and is confident where they’re going, but they have a child or friend who has not found that assurance. In some cases, the patient has tried all their life to share their faith with that person and they are worried that it has fallen on deaf ears.

Me, I’ll keep on singing. And sometimes I’ll do it in Bugs Bunny’s voice: “Dis woild is not me home, I’m just a-passin’ true … “

* Where did we get the idea that heaven would be us sitting around on clouds and playing harps? John Bunyan makes a point of that in “Pilgrim’s Progress”, but it’s not really Scriptural.