The Emigrants

July 18, 2014

The movers just left.  Most of our belongings are on their way to Kenya and in one week we will arrive in a foreign place far from here.  I thought I would be a little more sad to see our house empty, but it is a different feeling than I expected.  We are together again, and perhaps the joy of being together is off-setting the sadness of leaving a place so special.  Eleven years is a significant chapter in life, especially when those eleven years see your children grow from six to seventeen.  This home and this neighborhood, this place and this city have been good to us.  Even the trees are familiar to me here, personal friends in some sense.

And now we move across the ocean for some period of time, to a place unfamiliar and vastly different.  Yet we are always immediately in the presence of God, Who is everywhere and always there.  We are always and everywhere in the presence of the mysterious, unfathomable, yet deeply personal One in whose care we are entrusted.  I was reminded of this again yesterday.  Standing waiting to board in Houston, reading Kierkegaard on the Kindle app on my phone:

“But let us understand one another; the journey of which we speak is not long… it is only a single step, and you, too, have emigrated, for the Eternal lies much nearer to you than any foreign country to the emigrant, and yet when you are there the change is infinitely greater.  So then, go with God to God, continually take that one step more, that single step that even you, who cannot move a limb, are still able to take; that single step, that even the prisoner, who has lost his freedom, even the one in chains, whose feet are not free, is still able to take: and you are committed to the Good.  Nobody, not even the greatest that has ever lived, can do more than you.”

Step into the Eternal today.  Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.