By JC
I’m not usually awake at 4 a.m. reading poetry. Usually I’m awake at 4 a.m. staring at the ceiling, negotiating with it. But this morning my good friend Roberts Scott shared a poem on Facebook called “The Homing Beacon,” and it stopped me cold.
What It Asks
The poem is a string of honest questions. Why do we sense Heaven when all we can see is the world? Why do we hear eternal music in ordinary sound? Why do we feel awe at all, if everything is just matter bumping into other matter? If the mind is only dust that organized itself, why didn’t the rest of the dust in the universe wake up too? And the one that gets everybody eventually: will we ever see again the people we’ve loved and lost?
Then it turns. The longing itself is the answer. That built-in need to question isn’t a design flaw. It’s a signal, a beacon calling us back to the One who made us. Truth isn’t a theory we finally pin down. Truth is a Person, and we were made for His love.
Why It Hit Me
I’ve spent a lot of years asking these same questions, sometimes in prayer and sometimes in a band van at two in the morning, which is roughly the same thing with worse snacks. What I’ve found is that the questions don’t drive you away from God. Followed honestly, they drive you straight to Him.
Science measures the laws. Faith asks who wrote them. Beauty, conscience, and grief all point past themselves. We ache for home because we have one. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Not a way. Not a truth. The Truth, with a heartbeat, who knows your name and is leaving the porch light on.
Thank you, Roberts, for passing this along. If you know who wrote it, tell me, and I’ll gladly give them the credit they’ve earned. Go find it on Facebook and read the whole thing slowly. Then read it again.
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart.”
Ecclesiastes 3:11
JC is a Birmingham-area musician and writer and the founder of WeRock TV.
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