“North To Home” (with appreciation to Hallmark for the inspiration)

I just finished watching a new Hallmark movie call “North To Home”. It was probably one of the better Hallmark movies I’ve seen in a long, long time. The movie is set in Alaska, where 3 sisters were orphaned by an avalanche, and then taken in by another couple who survived the avalanche. The 3 sisters drifted apart over the years, to different places and were finally coming back together on the 25th anniversary of the tragedy and the 60th birthday of their adoptive mother. When the movie ended, happy ending of course, it brought back all kinds of memories of my childhood and early adulthood. You may have to see the movie to fully understand where my thinking was.

You see, I am the oldest of four and have always been a transplant. A North Carolina mountain girl by birth, my parents moved us to South Carolina when I was four. That was my first transplant. Married life has carried me back and forth across the Carolina state lines many times. But, none of the moves were “back home”. The whole time I was growing up in South Carolina, we always went north to go “home” for the holidays: Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving. We loaded up the car and traveled 200 miles north, to our original home in the foothills of North Carolina. How my mother did it with 4 kids, I will never know, but she did. You see it was home because it was where everything started. It was the area where all of the rest of the family lived. It wasn’t until my father died a few months after I married that we stopped going North for all of the holidays. Now, that doesn’t mean we stopped traveling north. We continued to go north to my grandmother’s home, up in the mountains, every Christmas Day, till she passed.

This made me realize that it wasn’t so much about going home as it was a “going tradition”. Some traditions find a natural end and we find ways of adding new ones to replace them. It also hit me that it wasn’t so much that we had to go but it was where we wanted to go because that was where the family was gathered together.

HOME is where the heart is. Our heart is where our love resides; Love for our family, friends, and the ones we hold dear. Our heart is a place that God made for love to reside. Heaven is the HOME he has prepared for us. This is what hit me! I don’t care where you are standing on the face of the Earth, if you were asked which direction is Heaven, you will point up or North. How amazing is that? North is the direction to The Home that has been prepared for us by God himself. The place where all of those who have the love of Jesus in their heart, will reside. So, let me ask you, are you ready to go North? Are you ready to head Home, to the place God has prepared for you? I pray that I will see you when we get Home.

John 14: 1-3 - “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God[a]; believe also in me. 2 My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.” (NIV)