Where is home?
In the cedar trees of my childhood
Pungent with laughter and pain
In a final resting place, planted
Where his ancestors have lain
Within the hard-tilled sowing
The field well watered with tears
Heart pieces with each child living
My treasure more parceled each year
This fragmented sense of belonging
Unsatisfied feeling of longing
Not settled, rooted, planted
No permanent sense of place
Just a stranger’s exiled wandering
Searching for the Father’s face
Two poems from my daughter’s perspective,
someplace with the feeling of home vaguely in the back of my mind…
that I can’t put a name to where
the collection of all the places where heaven has stung my heart with longing
it comes and goes like the pulling of my life strings
the smell of rain on pine
a swell of painful joy unexpected
a swaying slow melody
a verse I stumble upon and can’t think how I ever overlooked it
the feeling of being loved wonderfully but not remembering by who
the reminder that God is there
Oh Lord there is a fear and trembling in my heart
a untamable excitement racing in my soul
man is without words to start
how can this feeling be my own
oh love of a tract-less restless sea
cannot be expressed in words pen to tome
oh the goodness of my God to me
so great an adventure to find my home
By Brenna Richardson ©2009 (She categorically denies the existence of capitalization and punctuation.)
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy; the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” C.S. Lewis from Mere Christianity
“In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness… These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” C.S Lewis from Weight of Glory
Rich Mullins used to sing, “If I weep let it be as a man who is longing for his home”.