With Me Where I Am
My seven year old son is memorizing John 14, and it is starting out a little bumpy because he is having trouble with verse three. In his own words, the verse “says the same thing.” He is having trouble with the difference between “with me” and “where I am.” The verse says, “And if I [Jesus] go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”
Frankly, it does appear that Jesus was a bit redundant in His wording here. However, at closer inspection, there is a difference between the two phrases.
Think of it this way -
Let’s say I want to be with you. I could hop on a jet and fly to where you are to be with you. Now, another solution would be for me to send a plane to pick you up and bring you back to me. I would be with you in that scenario, as well. So, there are two ways for us to be together.
Now, let’s change the scope of our example slightly. Let’s say you were in the slum of a big city living in a tin shack with nothing to eat. You had no electricity, and it was cold causing you to perpetually shiver. This was the place where you lived. I could still hop on a plane to be with you in that place.
In this same scenario, let's say that I lived … oh, on a tropical island where the trees yielded fruit all year long. The temperature was wonderful and ocean waves lapped peacefully on the white sand beaches. On my tropical island I had everything necessary to survive, but not only survive, rather to live in absolute abundance - every need and want met. I could leave my paradise and go to be with you in the shack. Or, I could come get you, so that you could be with me, and take you back to my paradise, so that you could be where I am.
There, that’s the difference. When this thing is all finished, I will most definitely thank the Lord Jesus for coming to me where I was at. But I am going to fall to the ground in absolute gratitude to my Savior for bringing me to where He is!