With Me Where I Am

My 7 year old son is memorizing John 14 right now. It is starting out a little bumpy because he is having trouble with verse 3. 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 look, there most certainly is a difference between the two phrases.

Think of it this way -

Let’s say I want to be with you. So I could hop on a jet and fly to where you are and 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 then 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. Let’s say you had no electricity and it was cold outside so that you were perpetually shivering. This was the place where you lived. I could still hop on a plane and get to that place and be with you.

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 beautiful and ocean waves lapped peacefully on the white sand beaches. On my tropical island I had everything necessary to live, but not only to just live, rather to live in absolute abundance - every need and want met.  Now, I could leave my paradise and go to be with you in the shack. Or I could come and get you so that you can 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!

John 14:1-4