home...
it's christmastime, and everyone is talking about it: a place where you can eat awesome food, where intimacy and unselfconsciousness are natural, where friends and family unashamedly build their lives around each other because each one is important. where you could live heart and soul full-bore.

it's beautiful, and some have more memories of it and some have less, but either way it is transitory. it ages and changes and matures and declines and time, change, and distance take it away, leaving the emptiness of mortality and the restlessness of longing.

there it is, deep within, with the brisk chill and stillness of a rainy fall day in the mountains. frosty air plumes from our nostrils and mouths and we walk with purpose and memory. because it isn't a longing that pulls us backwards; it is a hope that calls us onward. the emptiness never was really full, but it was meant to be. faith tells us it will be.

so, like Abraham and Noah and Job we admit that we are strangers, wanderers here, looking for a city not built by human hands, and mothers and sisters and brothers and a Father not of human birth and earthbound fellowship, but of heavenly adoption and purposeful fellowship. and maybe we will not see it with our eyes, but we will not stop looking while we have them.

home...it is so far away.

"If I sing let me sing for the joy/that has bourn in me these songs/
and if I weep, let it be as a man/who is longing for his home."
-Rich Mullins