“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” Ever heard of that line?
Or how about, “Out of sight, out of mind.” That sort of suggests the opposite, doesn’t it?
Either statement can be true, depending on the subject at hand.
In my case I’m thinking about our daughter Megan, who along with her husband and our two grandchildren, moved over a thousand miles away from us a few weeks ago. Prior to their departure, they lived ten minutes from us and even stayed with us their final month here. We got to wake up with our grandkids on Christmas morning!
But after New Year’s they moved away.
Living away from family is hard, but it’s even tougher when you’ve been together for so long.
Yep. Absence indeed makes the heart grow fonder.
Now we communicate with them through phone, text, and FaceTime. That last mode of communication is my favorite. The other day when my wife and I called our grandkids Ivy (3) and Ezra (1), and our faces popped up on the screen, they gave us big smiles. Ezra reached out to give me a hug, but the best I could do was wave and blow him kisses.
In that moment I was reminded that while modern technology is great, seeing each other is not the same as being with each other.
This reality made me think of what it must have been like for the disciples when Jesus returned to heaven. No wonder they kept gazing into heaven after a cloud took him out of their sight (Acts 1:9-10), just as I kept looking down the road after my family drove off, until I couldn’t see them anymore.
I’m not sure when I’ll see them again in person, but in the meantime I’ll enjoy seeing them on FaceTime.
That’s kind of how Scripture works as it relates to Jesus. In 2 Corinthians 3:18, the apostle Paul says that as God’s children, we have nothing obstructing our vision of Christ and his glory as revealed in Scripture. Paul says it’s like looking in a mirror. Not so much the reflective capabilities of the mirror as the intimacy of it. We can hold a mirror right up to our face and get an unobstructed view.[1]
That’s a beautiful thing when it comes to seeing Jesus.
Even so, seeing Him is not the same as being with Him. That’s why Paul wrote, “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Phil. 1:23).
Likewise, Peter encouraged his fellow Christians who had never met Jesus in person, saying, “You love him even though you have never seen him [in person]. Though you do not see him now, you trust him; and you rejoice with a glorious, inexpressible joy” (1 Pet. 1:8 NLT).
Seeing Jesus isn’t the same as being with Jesus. But we can enjoy Facetime (or shall we call it FaithTime?) with Jesus in Scripture until we live with him forever in heaven.
Makes you kind of homesick, doesn’t it?
[1] John MacArthur, The MacArthur Bible Commentary (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005), p. 1624.