Not long ago I went to camp to speak to a group of Junior Highers.  One day all of the guys – canoed from camp to a peninsula about an hour away.  I had stayed up pretty late the night before and decided to relax and let the junior highers in my canoe do all the work.  It didn’t go so well.  The guy paddling in front was supposed to be the force.  He was to paddle on the same side of the boat during the trip and push us through the water.  The guy paddling in back was to be the rudder and steer us down the middle of the river.  However, communication was not going very well between them.  When the guy in front saw something coming toward them, He would attempt to steer sending us in toward the shoreline.  When the guy in back saw us heading the wrong way, he would paddle harder sending us there even faster!  We spent most of our trip canoeing back and forth from one side of the river to the other.

We knew where we were to go – down the middle of the river.  However, the troubles in the boat affected the direction we all went.  Paul in 1 Corinthians 11 talks about the church in Corinth heading in the wrong direction.  They weren’t in a canoe, but there was an undercurrent of division and discontent.  It kept the church in Corinth from heading down the middle of the river.  Rather than following Christ’s direction, as they should have, they ended up on the shoreline complaining how the other guy put them there.  I like how blunt Paul is with them.  Only a few chapters later in 1 Corinthians 15:34 he says, “Come back to your senses as you ought, and stop sinning; for there are some who are ignorant of God – I say this to your shame.”  People of the church of God – stop arguing.  Come to your senses, get in the boat, communicate with one another, and paddle down the river of life together.  There are many who do not yet know Christ.  Let’s show them the joy of paddling along with us and the rest of the church in God’s canoe. 

On our recent family vacation, we had the opportunity to visit all three places I have called home.  We stopped in West Virginia for a couple days, visited Clarks Summit while passing through Pennsylvania, and spent time in my hometown of North Tonawanda, New York.  All three communities have changed drastically since the days when I was a resident. It is an odd feeling when you visit a place you used to call home.  So much seems very familiar and yet you realize that you don’t belong there any more.  It is comfortable and “like home”…but not quite.  Like I said, rather odd.  It was a great trip, and we loved seeing people and places that have brightened our lives over the years but the closest feeling to “being at home” came when we crossed the bridge with that slow down to 35 mph sign because… “you are now entering the city of Evart.”  Home.  There’s no place like home.  True, but you know what…as I sit at my desk writing this, having dug through the mountain of vacation clutter…I realize that even here something comes up short of totally feeling home.  C.S. Lewis wrote this, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists…if I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world.”