this is the land of enchantment. this is my home. and i love it here in the high desert. i love the adventures we have found here, the trails that etch our back mountains like the lines on an old man’s face, the ever-changing weather, the brightening-darkening sky.

but we have been longing, lately, robert and i, for a different sort of adventure. a different sort of beauty. we think it is a combination of the travel bug and the longing of two california natives for our ‘home’ state. i hope that we will return to california someday, if we can find work there and a place we can turn into home. i also hope, wistfully, and almost certainly impractically, that maybe between here and california we might have the opportunity to pack up our backpacks and be wanderers for a time, to take months or a year to see some of this big and beautiful world that God has placed us in.

regardless of where we roam, where we drift and settle, however, i most sincerely hope that we will never find a place so beautiful or a home so comfortable that we lose our urge to wander, our sense of feeling that ‘our place’ is just a little too narrow. i hope that we will wander, and i hope that we will settle, and wherever we go, we will be home if we are together. but i hope that even the world itself will always be too small a place for us.

on april 27th, my beloved grandpa left this earth for a very much better one…he went Home to be with our Lord. it is painful to know that my best friend will never know him like i did. that we will have children who will only know him through stories…and whom he will never hold as he held me. that my little sister will not have memories of those brown polyester pants he used to wear, the brown shoes and the white undershirts with the v-neck.  i miss the jokes he won’t tell anymore, the donald duck voice he won’t greet my someday-babies with. the paper towels he kept in his pocket and the stale popcorn he kept in his truck. i miss the dances he won’t have with my daughters clinging to the tops of his shoes with bare little feet, swinging around the room to the sound of his vinyl records.

but i am so, so glad that he is Home. he is face-to-face with the Savior i love and long to see. the pain he has suffered for years is gone…he has been made new. his hands don’t tremble and he doesn’t have trouble breathing. and he is with Jesus.

i am thankful–inestimably thankful that i am home, living with my best friend and dearest love. i have never been as supremely happy as i am now, living and dancing and adventuring and lounging around watching movies and drinking lattes and getting up early and just simply breathing with him every day. i am thankful for the many things we share…including a restless heart, an urge to travel. i am thankful that regardless of where we travel, it will be home if we do it together. i hope that we will keep exploring, keep wandering this world, and always find it too small. i pray that we will settle into a more permanent nest, and never find it quite comfortable enough. i pray that we will never be Content until we are Home, too.

you see, home is not a place, but a person. my earthly home is robert. he is where i love to be. our heavenly Home, our mutual Home, is Christ. grandpa is Home now, and i rejoice for him…and for us, for my best friend and for me and for all of the believers who are wandering this beautiful earth right now, home or far from home, who are on our way Home, too. we may see a great deal or very little of the world between here and there, but one day we will be Home.

praise God for His marvelous grace.