The annual Youth Group camp out is happening this weekend, and although I'm too old to have a daughter in the youth group anymore, I am not too old to have a daughter chaperon, and so I made my annual trip to the shed to dig out our tent.  I have always found it a little exciting to get the tent out, and set it up.  I love being out-doors - hiking, canoeing,  riding - things I haven't done nearly as much as I would have liked, and will do even less  since getting Lyme's disease a few years ago. I have always talked to friends about hiking the Appalachian Trail, or canoeing the Red River (the northern one) to the Hudson Bay - but at 50 (nearly), and with a dislocated shoulder neither is likely to happen now.  Then again - those activities are really hard work - having read Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, and Eric Sevareid's Canoeing with the  Cree, I seriously doubt I'd have the stamina, or the attention span to see either adventure through to the end.
            Tent camping is great from sun-up to bed time, but I have never been able to sleep in a tent.  Tent-camping is great if the weather is great, but in a terrible storm it is miserable. Tents are portable and temporary. Buildings - especially those built well, last.  The Great Pyramids were 2000 years old when Abraham saw them, and we still see them today.  Abraham lived in tents.  We don't even have a swatch of fabric to know what his tents were like.
            Abraham left the most modern city of his day, Ur, to become a nomad of Mesopotamia, to live in tents.  He did so in obedient faith.  God told him to.  God also promised that something better would be given to him and his children.  He was Promised Land - a permanent home.  He was also promised a permanent future - blessing for his descendants, and through him, blessing for all humanity (Genesis 12.1-3).  Those promises were kept - are being kept, because his descendants did possess the Promised Land, and we are perpetually blessed by his faith through the coming of Jesus (Galatians3.6-9).  But like our father Abraham, we still live in tents.
            For we know that if this earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens…II Corinthians 5.1
            Paul calls the earthly body a tent. His metaphor reminds us how impermanent, exposed, even flimsy the body is. Paul would know. Later in this letter (11.21-12.10) he tells us about the punishment his body has taken, and the "thorn in the flesh" he deals with daily.  One lesson he takes from this is that Jesus' grace is sufficient, His strength is perfected in weakness (12.9-10). The first lesson he shares is that this "tent" is not our permanent home. God has a permanent one waiting for us in heaven.
            I was doing one of my shoulder exercises the other day and remembered quite vividly my grandmother doing the same exercise following her mastectomy back in 1969.  In those days the breast cancer survival rate was only about 50%, and "radical" meant they took just about everything but your arm.  I remember being truly scared for the first time, and thinking that my grandma was really too old to have to go through this.  She was two years younger then, than I am now.  The thing is, I don't feel that old - not as old as she looked to me then, or as I look to me now.  I bet you feel the same. That 14 year old kid is alive and well in all of us.
            The thing to remember is that our bodies are not who we are. Our bodies are where we are - temporarily. We have an eternal destination.  That destination will be enjoyed (or endured depending on the location) by and eternal, indestructible body (I Corinthians 15.35-53). That body will be a home, not a tent.