LIVING IN A TENT

 

For the record, I have avoided sleeping in a tent for over six decades - and I hope to keep that record intact for as long as I live. I don't do camping.  You ask me, "How do you know you won't like camping if you've never gone?"  

I just do. OK?  Case closed.

Whether you love camping or not, the one thing about living in a tent that we intrinsically understand is that living in a tent is a temporary thing. A tent is unable to weather a storm, protect us from predators, keep us warm when it's cold or keep us cool when it is scorching outside.  It takes a great deal more effort to survive if you are living in a tent.  

No one EXPECTS a tent to be a substitute for a permanent HOME.  

Except us.

This life we are living is being lived in a temporary tent. It's not the existence God created for humans.  Living in this earthly tent makes it difficult to weather a storm, to be protected from the predators in this life. God has a permanent and peaceful existence for us that is not a camping trip, but an eternity in the place He has prepared for me.

Remember when life is difficult, you're just living in a tent.

Look at life truthfully.  Everything about it is as flimsy as a tent.

Don't cling to the tent when it's time to go home.

"For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long to put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies.While we live in these earthly bodies, we groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and get rid of these bodies that clothe us. Rather, we want to put on our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life."

2 Corinthians 5:1-4