For a Home That Lasts

You probably don't have to read too many of my blog postings to surmise that I am a bit of a nostalgic person.  I hang on to phases and memories, I think because I feel the overwhelming brevity of them. So sometimes I muse about my life as though I were an old woman or coming face to face with  my mortality in some way. Not that we aren't all to some extent...

 I was thinking the other day about my childhood home.  My family built that house when I was about 10 on a piece of property that also included my grandparents house and my uncles house.  Family commune and all that.  Anyways, we tiled it, roofed it, and stuccoed it. I even helped lay out the shingles on the roof. They wouldn't let me have a nail gun. I can't imagine why.

Since that time, as you can imagine, a lot of memories were made in that house. I grew up there, came back there during college breaks, and me and my sister (and a couple close friends) were married there in our back yard.  I have every inch of that house memorized. I loved walking across my grandpa's garden to find my grandma with her straw hat, muddy knees and bright smile. Or finding my uncle with his calloused hands and soft heart. Or being greeted in  my grandparents kitchen by wood burning stove, sweet pickles, and invaluable life stories and lessons.

 Being very probably the most nostalgic one of my family (and the only one that moved far away), I think it hit me the hardest when my parents decided a little while ago to move.  I don't know what it is. There is something about things from your childhood remaining unchanged for you to come back to that give your life a feeling of anchor.  Things are always adrift, but this will always be there, holding fast.  But this, of course, is an illusion.  Because nothing - not houses, not people, not cities, not nations- nothing truly lasts.  My own body is only a temporary home.  As is our beautiful planet. Nothing that is will always be.

But I can feel that longing, sometimes intensely, for that home. That lasting home, that will never give way to the pressures of time.  For the fullness of that hope that God will restore and remake.  As I watch the moments and years pass that I cannot hold on to, I remember that I'm not home yet. No, not yet.