Groaning for Home
by Joe Leavell
Photo by Fabrizio Verrecchia from Pexels
The clock doesn’t seem to ever want to move! The hours keep dragging on, the work is hard, and your mind is already on your plans for when you get home and for your weekend.
You will get to rest, enjoy your family, eat a nice dinner together, relax in the comfort of your own home with the plans you’ve been anticipating all week, and enjoy not thinking about work for the entire weekend.
But that stubborn clock won’t budge, and the minutes slowly drag on.
Both customers and employees alike are in a bad mood which doesn’t help. They’ve definitely taken their pound of flesh out of you today!
How. Much Longer. HOME!!
When you are finally released from the day that would never end, you jump in your vehicle and race down the freeway only to find traffic is a complete parking lot. NO!!! Not today!! 5 miles an hour you plod through an endless sea of cars with one thing on your mind:
Home. Just want to go home!
After a seeming eternity of bumper to bumper traffic, you get that call from your spouse saying that you are out of milk and need some eggs. So, you rush into the store and find the perfect parking spot up front, grab the items in record time and rush to the checkout and find the shortest line.
Of course, the customer is asking to speak to a manager! But surely this won’t take long right?
Once again time stops as they get into a mostly unwarranted but strangely tense discussion.
Eons later, “Excuse me! Do you want to come over to the line I just opened up?”
Salvation! Someone noticed my plight!!
WHAT?? Ugh…they were talking to the person who just came up behind me and has been waiting approximately 2 seconds! Of course!! I’ll never get home!!
GROAN!!
The conversation between the manager and the customer is rivaling the Lincoln/Douglas debates in length so you finally go look for another line. Finally, there appears a lane where there is only one person and they’ve already been rung up. You quickly unload before you realize that this customer is an expert coupon shopper. So, while you hear the ding, ding, ding, of every coupon being scanned, you watch that line that you had just abandoned start buzzing through customers as you are continue to inwardly groan.
I’m so tired…I just want to go home…
The Pain is Real
People are groaning.
These are deeply hurting people who have endured more than their fair share of sorrow and struggles through their lives. Some have decades of heartache and grief that they have not been able to process. Some have suffered real wrong at the hands of others one too many times. Others are still very young but have just now begun to see the hurts of this world. These are taken aback by the evil and the heartache that they are experiencing for the first time and for which they were not ready. Inside, many of them well up deep pools of sorrow and frustration as they reflect on the madness they have had to endure in their time here on earth.
Looking for a Home
Whatever the circumstances, all people know in their hearts that this world is not as it should be.
That angst inside of us, when we see or experience real suffering and evil, says, “This is wrong!” and we usually react by doing whatever we can to change our circumstances and make the pain go away.
In a culture that looks away and ignores pain and suffering, some react by pretending all is well when it is not. They cause fresh pain on those who struggle as if there is something wrong with them for feeling hurt and sorrow at difficulties in the first place. Sometimes this causes a deep sense of depression that they cannot neither understand nor shake.
Rather than looking to God who gives hope, many look endlessly elsewhere to ease their groaning. They look to their spouse, children, friends, sports, politics, sex, drugs, fame, careers, education, and anything else they can grasp onto in order to find freedom from their sense of painful groaning. These solutions always fall short, because they only mask the pain of being cut off from an eternal home with God. In a very heartbreaking way, unbelievers are groaning for a home and yet without Christ will remain eternally homeless.
For some, this sense of pain from their experiences and hurts become so powerful that when their solutions to mask or dull the pain fail, they are left with no hope for freedom from their groaning. They often take their own life in suicide in desperation.
Groaning is no small matter.
Longing for Home
Scripture not only helps us make sense of this pain that we feel it also gives us complete permission to feel that pain without pretending it doesn’t exist. In fact, it anticipates the pain and looks at the understanding of pain as a reflection of wisdom.
Ultimately, this groaning is meant to point us to Christ Himself, our eternal hope. Scripture describes this angst within us an unrealized longing to leave this world of pain and sorrow, and to enter God’s rest and peace in the eternal presence of Jesus.
Romans 8:18-26 depicts a world where the entire creation somehow understands that it has been cursed because of mankind’s sin and is groaning for the day when Jesus returns as King, releasing creation from its curse. Believers are illustrated by a woman experiencing the pain of childbirth – longing for the pain to have meaning, to be over, and for the joy of the baby in their arms. In this way, believers long for the promised of God for our joyful adoption as sons to be realized while in the middle of the anguish of labor.
That sorrow that you feel, that groaning, is ultimately for the same Jesus who came to redeem us from our sins to return in power and majesty! We long for Him to make every wrong right and to make the crooked straight. He promised that He will make all things new, will wipe every tear, and will give us our eternal inheritance.
This life that we live now includes a deep angst to be free from the presence of sin, from the wearing out of our bodies in death, from all suffering and wrongdoing, and to finally be in the presence of our Savior where we will worship Him in His presence for eternity. We long and groan for that day! In this way, that groaning is a very good thing because it is a reflection of Jesus’ prayer to the Father, “Your Kingdom Come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Groaning Unmasked
Christ’s Kingdom is coming to earth but is not yet physically realized. The days of waiting are long. The pains of life are real. And so we groan on, not in sorrow without any hope, but in understanding and eager anticipation of home.
Frankly, because the truth of Christ brings freedom, believers are free to cease from striving after false sources of hope and fulfillment to dull the pain. As we mature in Christ, and our anticipation for His presence grows, our groaning and anticipation is free to actually deepen, to be more earnest with anticipation, and not less.
If you’ve ever spent time around a saint whose body has begun to fail them, you’ve seen this play out in front of you as they verbalize their earnest longing for home more vocally than the rest of us. We all long for the day when we shed these worn out bodies and our mortality will be swallowed up in life that comes from Christ (2 Corinthians 5:4) but those closer to death seem to get it more than the rest.
Groaning for our Savior, like a bride longs for her groom on her wedding day, is not a bad thing or sinful. It’s an act of faithful anticipation of joy. It is longing to get home.
To be sure, there is a difference between groaning for God and grumbling against God. We groan but do so with patient trust in God’s perfect timing and goodness. We do not demand that God answer to us or our timing. We will look into the difference between groaning and grumbling in our next post.
