What do you think?

An invitation. I open it, and it’s a blank card inside the envelope. It glows with golden light.

I answer, taking the feather pen from the inkwell and I begin to write:

I think there are a lot of worldly thoughts on my mind: responsibitlies, opportunities, future difficulties, present uncertainties. Of what are you uncertain? Simply the strangeness of living in a place that doesn’t feel like home, for so long: a restlessness. But what is supposed to feel like home? The place I grew up, or the place I long for that is furnished with the perpetual furnishings of fellowship, light, and truth? Is it because I have wandered like a bird from the nest, or that I am flying beneath an open heaven, free and wind-borne. Or is it that I am just in between homes? My first home which felt like home because I was loved and where I belonged, and my everlasting home which will feel like home because I am loved and belong there. It is a bit like being a tree in strange soil, a cat in a new house, a planet on the colder part of its orbit. A wanderer I once aspired to be. Now, all I want in life is home.

Do I go back? Shed the growth which God hath wrought, abandon the quest to gain more than could be if I stayed? Do I attempt to stop the movement of the glacier sliding ever towards equilibrium, or try to teach the tides to play catch up? Do I let the fire die by leaving off the stoking and letting the heat slowly diminish back to ashes? This I cannot do, for much is before me still to do.

Do I run forward? Pass each milestone like a mile marker on the interstate? Do I bury my head in the end, seeing only what is possible in the age to come? Shall I take the helicopter up to the mountaintop? Shall I read the the final chapter of the novel rather than let the story unfold. Do I cast my thoughts ever to the distance, neglecting the present reality? Such a decision would, doubtless, spoil the journey.

It is windy up here, flying like a sparrow over a vast countryside as the sun sets. Home is where the winds of change are warmed by the present love of the ones with whom we share our lives. Therefore, though I am wandering, let us wander together, so that as we too live between homes, we can keep our hearts ripe for the feast that awaits us when our tired limbs have carried us the last league. For now, as we settle into the cadence of our footfalls, let us put an arm out to steady one another, and in good time, we will be home together.