In Which We Venture Back to the Blue House on the Hill

As I lie in bed, pecans tumbling down like raindrops, pitter-pattering onto the camper top, I smile. I’m wearing the air like a blanket as I snuggle in a little closer to my baby.

Moments before now, I slept unaware of the tiny bodies at my front and back, my hand intertwined with my husband’s as I dreamed of home – the blue house on the hill with white shutters and flurries of snow.

This trip. This journey has been long. It feels like years since I put my head down in the same place for more than a few nights in a row. Months since I stood in that glass shower looking out the window at the mountain of snow and skiers. Many passing moments since we sat around our dining room table sharing family devotions and meals cooked by our own hands over a gas burning stove.

It’s been a long journey. But it’s also been exhilarating realizing that our very own home country is full of various cultures, backgrounds and religions. The founding fathers would be proud, I think, to see what they built. Like any good thing there’s always the bad. The underlying poverty, the squandering of opportunity by many, and religions that miss out on the life giving message of the only true God.

As I have traveled the roads of my country for forty days, there is something sacred, something beautiful tugging my heart and occupying my mind.

This is not my home. The blue house on the hill is not my home.

My home, my final resting place is Heaven.

My mind can only imagine what Heaven will be like as I’ve seen and experienced beauty of His hand all around me over the last month or so. To see God’s land in purity, without sin, without darkness, without tears and sadness.

Because even as I experienced some of the most spectacular moments of my life so far, I experienced darkness that I’ve only read about, wondered about, and heard about.

The story of the waitress who was displaced from her home for eight years after Hurricane Katrina. The homeless woman relieving herself on a park bench in the middle of the day. The smell of Bourbon Street. The allies of Chicago. The back roads of Tennessee.

These moments cling heavy as I make my way up the rocky path lined with dying plants and a cobweb covered doorway.

But then the door creaks open, we step into light and we breathe. We breathe the familiar smell of home. Of the blue house on the hill. A taste of what is to come.

As we settle back into home this week, I will let the silence of the Colorado night surround me. I’ll move into the normal routines of life again, of laundry and dinner and fellowship. And I will dream of Heaven. Of the day when I will see Jesus face to face. The real coming home. My only true home.