Five in Tow
The ransom
The Ransom: Day 27 of 31 Days
For Day 1, click on the photo above
The Enchanter is crafty, and it takes a great deal of effort to sift the truth from the lies when he comes whispering in our ears. But it is worth the fight because the ransom paid for us was so dear. Only the precious blood of Christ could break the bonds of our sin-inheritance and grant to us, former enemies of God, the riches of His glory and the inheritance with the saints.
What an amazing grace.
In my mind, I live in house that has stood longer than I have, built by hands that lived before my time. The floor creaks and the stairs are warped from generations of feet climbing up and down, softly wearing their reflections into the wood.
Ancient trees reach out arthritic hands to knock on the windows when the winds blow up, and out in the orchard, I can spend hours under gnarled apple trees and watch as the fruit swells fat and ripe. Decades have passed since shovels broke the dirt and turned the soil and sank saplings into the earth as a kind of security for the years to come.
This place, this home I imagine, is a place of generational blessing, where babies are nursed in the same rooms they grow up in, and the same rooms they sleep in when they come back with children of their own. Here, change is never sudden and new is measured in years, not hours or minutes. Each passing season brings a deepening in me—a peaceful settling in, the way a house settles in to the earth until it’s hard to tell where one begins and the other ends.
I long to be home like that, where home is a part of me, like the skin I live in.
But I’ve never had that.
And I never will.
All my life, I have been transplanted just as soon as the roots have started to wriggle deep into the soil. Once a handful of memories are created, they are packed up and moved on to a new place that doesn’t feel like mine, that doesn’t feel like me.
And every single time, I feel like a bit of plankton, floating about in a great big sea, with no idea what part of the blue is up, and what part of the blue is down, and all I want to do is plant myself somewhere for a great long time.
But the waves won’t let me.
It is my calling, and I know it, to be always a stranger, always a sojourner, always longing for a place to return to that does not exist. In a sense, everywhere is home, and nowhere, all at once.
My heart breaks over it sometimes. I want a place of my own, a little corner of the earth to claim and tame, subdue and improve. I want a little kingdom here, and I grieve when I realize that I will not have it, that my children will not have it.
There is no house. There is no land. There are no generational memories to make or keep and no spreading fruit trees by which to mark the seasons. There is no home.
At least, not here.
But on the other side of time and space there is a haven for my homeless heart. “I go to prepare a place for you,” He said, and my heart leaps when I read the words because I am a woman without a place. Those words are a precious promise to someone like me.
Just for a minute, I close my eyes and forget my wanderings, so I can see it. Nestled in among ancient trees is a house built by the Father who desires to be my rest. The staircase is worn smooth by the feet of the One who waits for me, His Bride, to come home, to be home. I think there must be moss on the garden stones and a fire on the hearth and a thousand memories held in by the walls, as if I have been there all along because it was meant for me, all along.
It is home.
All the longings of my earthly shell, every godly dream left unfulfilled, is there perfected and redeemed. Not a single sacrifice or service has gone unnoticed. It is all repaid in glorious abundance and loving detail. Even the waiting breaths, the questioning and tearful prayers, the years of doubts and fears and unrealized dreams—are there restored to me as if none of it was ruined or wasted.
Home. It is a true home from which I can never be uprooted Nothing can steal away the memories I’m storing up there, because all of it, past, present, and future, is built into that place. All of it is part of the story of that place, that home, and I am a piece of it. There will be no good-byes, no pulling away, no awkward beginnings, only—always—belonging.
This hope of heaven, this hope of home, is so glorious that even a small taste of it is better than anything I’ve found on earth. I must believe that if my wanderings leave me longing for heaven and dissatisfied with earth, then let me wander, and let me ache.
For surely, it is better to ache for heaven than to be content with earth.
Surely, it is a gift of God to wander anywhere that leads me closer to home.
The wind was a little wild this morning, and the clouds hung low. I peeked out from under my covers and saw a sliver of silver-gray daylight and the cedars dancing through the storm.
Today was the day God was going to show up.
We have been wandering up and down and all through this wilderness, going where we believe God has asked us to go, but the strain of it has nearly wasted me. The hills are steep and roll on one after another like waves so we can barely catch our breath on the way down before losing it again on the way back up.
Then, at what we hoped was the very end of the journey, we came to a river. We did not know there were going to be any rivers.
It was too wide to swim.
It was too deep to cross.
And we didn’t have a boat.
I stood on the shores of this great big river and I wanted to shout up to the heavens. “Why did you lead us here? We cannot cross here!”
Because it seemed a little personal, right then, when I had prickers in my socks and blisters on my toes. No one had said anything about rivers.
A few other people joined us on the shore and contemplated the water with us. “There might be a way to cross,” someone said.
My heart skipped over that little bit of hope.
“I think someone upstream has a boat.”
A little whisper came into my mind, “Have faith. God will show up.”
So we set up camp and we waited. We waited through one day, and another. It was dark in the night and it was dark in the day. I fought against the impossibility of crossing that little slip of water. Fat, salty tears dropped into the waves, and I ate too many of the frozen cream puffs someone sent over for consolation.
Surely there had to be a way! When was there not a way? For heaven’s sake, I could see the other side!
But there was no way the first day, and there was no way the second day.
This is a test of faith, I reasoned. Other people said it too, and we all nodded wisely and said faithful things and I stoked up my belief because this was going to work, this faith thing.
That is how we came to the third day. This day.
And God showed up.
But God said no.
Maybe it was a “not yet”–it’s hard to tell with God– but it wasn’t a “yes” and it certainly wasn’t a bridge or a boat or even a life vest. It wasn’t anything my faith could conjure up.
The river remained, wide and lapping at the shores. And we remained stranded with the great big wilderness behind us and the impervious waters before us and a God who said “no” and not much else.
But at least we were there with God.
And I thought to myself, on a grey day when the wind was wild and the cedars danced, that if all I have in this life is a great big wilderness and a river I can’t cross, it is enough if God is in the midst of it.
*This past week, my husband completed the long and arduous process of applying for Active Duty as an Army chaplain. His paperwork (which was lost once) was resubmitted on time. But due to a random computer error, his recruiter team was unable to submit his packet by the deadline. All attempts to fix the problem failed, even though they stayed up until 3 am working on it.
There was no boat.
But we are here at the shores of a great big river with a mighty God, and that is enough.