Home for Christmas

The call to come home is as old as the human race. In the holiday season, that voice reverberates through the echo chambers of our souls.

Early in life, I learned I was expected to be home for Christmas. So I was with my parents every Christmas for 34 years. In those 34 years, I had graduated from high school, college, and seminary; I had worked full-time as a minister, college professor and writer-editor; I had taken unto myself a wife; I had lived in Kentucky, South Carolina and Georgia.

Even after I became a father, for as long as my parents were alive, a strong inner voice silently yelled, “Let’s go to Texas!”  Sometimes that call still comes, though Daddy and Mother and some of our siblings have gone to that Eternal Home.

When Johnny Mathis gives out with “I’ll be home for Christmas; you can count on me,” in my mind’s eye and in my heart of hearts, I am once again part of a happy throng of six brothers and sisters, spouses, and children, overflowing one of the modest houses or apartments Mother and Daddy called home over the years.

I have missed a great deal over the decades by not being around my brothers and sisters and their spouses and oncoming generations. Now, our sons have followed my example as they live and work, far from their parents: Russell in New York and Jonathan in Chicago. They have their own individual patterns for the holidays, and I say, “God bless them for it.”

People often ask, “Don’t you wish your sons would come home for Christmas?” I usually just smile or grimace, but I think to myself: “I would love to see them, but they are at home. They’re away from us, but they have their homes in Chicago and New York.  They have their lives. They have their responsibilities. It isn’t easy to travel long distances, especially with children.”

In “The House of Christmas,” G. K. Chesterton described the call to come home this way:

For men are homesick in their homes, 

        And strangers under the sun,

And they lay their heads in a foreign land 

        Whenever the day is done.

Those lines suggest that every human being is away from home.

The Christmas story is about One who left his Father’s home, who was born in a manger, who in adulthood had no place to lay his head, who was buried in someone else’s tomb, who identified his family as larger than his mother and birth brothers and sisters, 

a family “born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will  of man, but of God” (John 1:13).

So, whether we are with our human families this Christmas or spending the time alone, we need to listen for the call of God, welcoming us to the warmth of his family. Jesus came to earth to call all his brothers and sisters back to his Father’s house.