Blog 3694 – 12.16.2025

Finding Your Way Back Home

For many years the three most beloved words in the English language were Heaven, home and mother. For some time one might think those three words have been replaced with money, power, and advantage. I am reminded as I write this of words attributed to Jesus from his Sermon on the Mount: “Where your treasure is there will your heart be also.”

As a small boy the words heaven and home were synonymous with the word mother to me. I loved my mama first and foremost and when a Bible teacher in Public School, yes they allowed Bible to be taught in Public schools in Tennessee when I was a boy, quoted another verse attributed to Jesus, “If anyone would be my disciple he must hate his mother and his father.” That was a deal breaker for me. Even when the teacher explained that Jesus did not want us to hate our mother and father only to love them less than him I knew as a boy that I would never be a disciple of Jesus. I forgot that as a young man and into my early forties till I realized that I had imprisoned myself in a narrow fundamentalist personality cult and got myself out. One of the first thing personality cults do is to separate you from friends and family and isolate you, teaching that Dear Leader alone is the answer – your heaven, your home, and your beloved parent all rolled into one.

Before I left home for the military at eighteen I had transferred my affections to a young girl that I would marry six days before I left for Vietnam. For the eleven months that I served in South Vietnam she was the home I could not wait to get back to. Little did I know at least till her letters stopped four months before I returned that I had no home to come back too. That marriage was over before it really began. Yet, I still thought that I could find heaven and home outside myself. After thee more tries I finally found a woman who loved me enough to put up with me. And I am so glad and grateful for her, but she is not my home, my heaven, nor my loving and infinite source, my mother. Those three beloved things are for me, my higher best self.

When Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you, that is what I think he meant.” Only when we come to know Who and Whose we truly are do we begin to be at home in our own skin. The soldiers returning from Korea and Vietnam were not greeted with homecoming parades. I met a fellow Vietnam veteran some years ago who said that whenever he spoke to a group that he always asked, “Are there any Vietnam veterans in the group, if so please raise your hand.” Then he would smile and say, “Welcome home, brother.”

My dad used to say to guests in our home, “If you’re not home, you ought to be.”

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David James White