This life, y’all.

We’re wanderers and settlers. We are at once building something and traversing time. We stay and leave.

And I don’t know if you’re like me but I want rest and adventure both. Because even though I can feel cozy at home and in others’ homes and can provide shelter for those who need it, including this family, this isn’t everything.

There’s a restless heart in me, and it wants a bigger, galactic, richer, softer, whole-er Home. The one I create is but a reflection, just as we are not God but are in His image.

It’s a shadow of the real thing, just as this world is but a shadow of the newness to come when God sweeps in and breathes afresh to make the new heavens and earth.

And the glimpses of God’s presence here on this old, dark, beautiful-and-marred earth. They’re like the keyhole glance into a place of glory. Mind you, I think when we sense that presence, we’re not looking through the hole into a room, but rather out of this limited space to a grand infinity all filled by God Himself.

That theoretical outside, the place I’ll be sooner than I realize, is Home. Even here we understand the concept of a person being home to us. How much greater will we grasp it when we’re face to face with the Creator of concept and people and faces.

And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. [Revelation 21:22-25]

We won’t need a temple or a home or a sun. Now, we have places of worship and stars to give life and light. Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. [1 Corinthians 13:12]

We need these now, and once we know God, we see how these teach us about Him. We see that they reflect His glory and power and love.

But then, my dear. Then, God will be our only Home and light.

Here’s the thing. Followers of Christ are meant to display what life is meant to be like. So we are the ones who practice the kingdom. We are the ones who live as though the future were already here.

We’re granted to show people glimpses through keyholes.

And beyond the glimpse, we can only imagine.

…

Then Frodo kissed Merry and Pippin, and last of all Sam, and went aboard; and the sails were drawn up, and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped away down the long grey firth; and the light of the glass of Galadriel that Frodo bore glimmered and was lost. And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise. [J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King]

The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning. And as he spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before. [C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle]