Come Home --Spoken Word Given by Lloyd D. Newell.

Come Home

Delivered By: Lloyd D. Newell

Home can be the most inviting place we know: the cozy place where we love, the warm place where we rest, the happy place where we laugh, the comforting place where we learn, the welcoming place where we know we really belong. In so many ways, home is more a feeling than a place. When we eventually leave the home of our childhood to make a home of our own, we usually model it after the home we left. Of course, we make a few adjustments. We improve upon weaknesses and build upon strengths; sometimes we have to remodel completely. But more often, the home we build resembles the one we knew. Even if the floor plan and the furnishings differ, we try to re-create the love and tenderness, the mercy and sweet forgiving. Few stories reflect these characteristics of home better than the story of a son who, anxious to leave home, claimed his inheritance from his father and wasted it on “riotous living.” Destitute, he finally “came to himself” and journeyed home to a forgiving father, who embraced him with open arms. When his older brother, who had dutifully stayed home, protested his brother’s special treatment, his father gently reminded him: “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.” In a sense, the older son also had wandered from home, losing his awareness of his father’s love: not in a far country but in the fog of selfishness and resentment. (See Luke 15:11–32.) Truly, both sons needed to come home. And so do all of us. Something inside us seems to yearn for our heavenly home, and each time we selflessly love and freely forgive, we not only re-create that home here on earth, but we also, in a very real way, come home. Program #4151