The Promise of Home by Rose McCormick Brandon

Great confusion awaited the disciples. They were soon to encounter the chaos of the cross. They wouldn’t understand it. They expected Jesus to set up His kingdom and to rule with Him in a world dominated by His peace. They will someday, but they couldn’t see the vast river of time separating the cross and resurrection from the established Kingdom of God. 

                They, and we, are still waiting in the river. Jesus' message to them is His message to us today: 

Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me. There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am. John 14:1-3 NLT

                Sin and madness appear to rule. Events take place that cause our agendas to explode. Anarchy shrieks and lawlessness threatens. Scoffers deride Jesus’ message. They heap scorn on us who wait for His coming. 
               Don’t be discouraged by mockery. Jesus always keeps His promises. When the time is right – when our home in Heaven is ready, when the last soul kneels at the cross, when the Almighty gathers all the threads of history and ties them together – then, He’ll come and take us HOME.
                How the heart warms at the thought of home. A sanctuary. A place of relaxation. We can go shoeless, shirtless, pyjama-clad, hair undone, and feel no guilt. Because we’re home. 
               A much greater life than one of security and ease awaits us. Our true and eternal home. We may not have identified it as a longing for God’s house, but it’s been there, always, niggling at the soul, a nameless pining. A yearning for HOME. 
                 When the drapes open to let in today’s light ask, “Is it today, Jesus, that everything will be ready?” Perhaps not today, maybe not tomorrow, but some day, oh my, the curtain between heaven and earth will rend and a blast of heavenly light will release all His followers from the dust and carry us home. 

                Today, my Lord, let me ponder the heavenly home you’re preparing for me. It’s beyond my imagination, still, I can dream of it as I wait for You. 

***

Rose McCormick Brandon is the author of four books, including Promises of Home – Stories of Canada's British Home Children, plus dozens of personal experience pieces, devotionals, short stories and essays. Rose’s work has won awards in the personal experience and short essay categories. A member of The Word Guild and The Manitoulin Writers Circle, Rose and husband, Doug, summer on Manitoulin Island where her pioneer ancestors settled and the home of his favourite fishing holes. The rest of the year, they live in Caledonia, Ontario, near their three children and three grandchildren. 

Storytelling—Carolyn R. Wilker

If someone asked me what I liked best when I was a child, it might have been hearing stories. When Mom tucked us in at night, she told us a story—such as Little Red Riding Hood or The Three Bears that she told from memory. Every week at Sunday School, the teacher read a Bible story.

When we girls were a little older, we told those stories or read to our younger siblings. When relatives gathered around the table for a meal, guess what? More stories.

During my Grade 6 year, when I was off school for several weeks on account of illness, my mother knew a good way to occupy my time. She bought three brand new books for me and I sped through them. I had nothing else to do, but read and sleep. Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell, Trixie Belden and the Red Trailer Mystery were done in a matter of days, and having new books of my own was a treasure.

My Grade 8 teacher read to us each day after lunch. I didn’t want to miss any of the adventures, whether it was Tom Sawyer or Swiss Family Robinson, two of the three books he read to us that year.

We had a library in our nearby community. One day Mom said to my sister and me that we could go to the library while she did some errands in town and that we were to be back at the car in ten minutes. I was overwhelmed at the choices and neither of us could not decide on one book in such a short time and so went back to the car without a book, which surprised my mother. We would have needed a library card and we lacked the time to do both. It was as bit disappointing and we didn’t get another opportunity. Farm life was busy; and time was at a premium.

In high school we had our own library in the school, from which I borrowed one book in my first year. I travelled to school by bus, and it was winter; the buses were cancelled because of a blizzard, and though I returned the book immediately after getting off the bus the next day, the librarian still gave me a hard time because the book was one day late. I never borrowed another book from that place.

Later, when I taught preschoolers, I borrowed books from the nearby library to augment our school’s collection and ones that I wanted to read too. That was the real beginning of my love of the library and being a regular patron.

I took my children to the library when they could only toddle across the floor or climb the steps on hands and knees. We borrowed stacks of books each time and read a story at bedtime every night and during the day.

 

Middle daughter with her book about cats to tease her into reading

My girls are grown. Our eldest is an avid reader, the youngest is studying for a new career, and the middle one reads to her two small children. And I read and tell stories to my granddaughters too.  

Today, after telling stories at the Waterloo Region Museum, to other people’s children, I stopped at the library to pick up a book that I had reserved, and then another. 

On Tuesday this week, a bag of books I have collected and read over the years, minus ones I cannot part with or need to keep, will go to a new home—the Ronald McDonald House—so that parents, having a sick child and time on their hands, might pick up a book for pleasure and enjoy it themselves or read to their child. It’s a small thing I can do to help them and share the pleasures of a good story.

www.carolynwilker.ca

Once Upon a Sandbox, Hidden Brook Press

When the Bright Lights Dim - Gibson

The “Painter of Light,” as the world knew him, died last month. Artist and author Thomas Kinkade, widely known as a devout Christian, was among the world’s highest earning and most popular living artists.


After his death, I sat with one of his books on my lap, and one of my grandbeans at my side. Reading aloud. Every so often she stroked a page. “That’s SO beautiful, isn’t it Nana?”

Indeed. Page after page showed heavenly views. Homes and cottages with lighted windows; abundant, colourful gardens, tidy stone pathways leading to quiet forests, and skies resplendent with God’s glory.

The artist chose to illuminate his paintings with words like these from poet Eliza Cook: “Sweet is the hour that brings us home, where all will spring to meet us…”

Kinkade was good at making people long for home. Repeated references to his own home and family cheered and encouraged admirers of his work: Keep your hearts at home. Enjoy the good God has given you there, at your side. Those were Kinkade’s messages.

But the artist’s simple pastoral canvases, of late, hid something disturbing. The last several years of the fifty-four year old painter’s life included great personal darkness. As critics in the art world accused him of schamltz, sentimental trip-trap, and the equivalent of artistic harlotry, reports of his bizarre behavior increased. Gallery owners accused him of defrauding people in the name of God. He battled with alcoholism. He replaced his wife with another woman, and became estranged from his family.

Pedestals are perilous places. Pride and popularity taper up to the jagged pinnacle of greed and wealth, and not many can keep their balance there. Apparently Mr. Kinkade lost his. I grieve that, but I understand it.

And this: When my grandchild and I finished reading that book on the warmth and blessings of home, every page filled with something that fingered her tender heart, she closed the book, stood up and said, Nana, I want to go home. So I walked her home. Her daddy greeted her with a hug and welcomed her there.

Good work, Thomas, I thought. No matter what you were.

Like Mr. Kinkade, I strive to serve God and others well with the gifts he has given. But also like him, I am a worm. An earth-crawler with dirt on my face, the hope of heaven in my spirit, and a prayer in my heart: “Lord, may the seeds I plant grow a longing in people’s souls for all things right and good.”

But God forbid that thinking I stand, I fall. For one day he will judge me and Mr. Kinkade and you, too—not on what has grown from our lives, but on whether he finds love and acceptance of his own Son, Jesus Christ, nestled in our hearts.

As did my grandbean, I pray to arrive safely home to be met by my Father’s embrace.

(Sunny Side Up-wk. of April 30)

Among other places, author, newspaper columnist and broadcaster Kathleen Gibson ponders faith and life in Sunny Side Up and on Simple Words.

Home — A Novel To Be Savoured — Martin

In order to talk about Home, it’s impossible to not talk about Gilead (2004),Marilynne Robinson’s wonderful Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. That’s because the home spoken of is in the imaginary town of Gilead, Iowa, and the characters are those from the previous novel. When I read Gilead, I didn’t want it to end. Robinson has, thankfully, added to her earlier triumph.

The differences are subtle. Gilead is a beautiful, literary novel, written from the perspective of an elderly Congregationalist minister John Ames. Beginning in 1956, he is writing about his life to his young son, who he fears will have few direct memories of his father, if the minister’s heart condition continues to deteriorate. Ames had lost his first wife in childbirth, and has recently married a much younger woman. Ames’ best friend is Gilead’s Presbyterian minister, William Boughton. Both men have named a son after each other. John Ames Boughton (Jack), unfortunately, became a wayward man who left his family in disgrace when he left Gilead. Gilead moves slowly but surely because Robinson’s powerful characters wrestle through important life issues with both weakness and deep faith.

Home takes place in the early ‘60s. It comes from the perspective of Glory, the youngest of William Boughton’s children. She has returned “home” to care for her aging father, after her own life hasn’t turned out as she had hoped. Significantly, Jack also returns “home” after a twenty-year, uncommunicative absence. He hadn’t even appeared at his mother’s funeral. Jack’s life has moved from disappointment to disaster, and now he has alcoholism and years of broken relationships to deal with.

Glory struggles with the faith she learned from her parents, Jack’s narrow rejection of salvation despite his intellectual acknowledgement of Christian truth, and the town’s readiness to write Jack off for his sins. She views things through a more complex lens. Glory has her own sins to deal with, and has such compassion for her troubled brother because she understands how circumstances sometimes turn against us.

I highly recommend Home, but suggest you should start with Gilead. If we’re fortunate, Marilynne Robinson will write yet another sequel. I know I’ll be ready to buy it.

Home is published by Harper Collins (2009)

D.S. Martin is Music Critic for Christian Week. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Coming Home - Shepherd

We are enjoying settling into our own home after nearly thirty years of living in accommodation provided by our employer. We have come back to the city that we consider home. We chose to purchase our very own condo. That means no snow to shovel, which this year has been a great relief. There are no gardens to weed, but in the next few weeks we will begin to enjoy the lawns and gardens tended by others. This will give us time to gaze out of our living room and master bedroom windows that provide a spectacular view of the bay across the street from our home. We feel like we are living our dream.

Coming home to a place where we spent so many years when we were young has enabled us to once again nurture the friendships we valued as young adults. Over the years we have fallen into and out of each other’s lives as we have moved around from one place to another, always touching base at Christmas and whenever we happened to find ourselves in the same city. In spite of our geographical separations our hearts have remained in tune with one another. Now we can arrange to have coffee on the spur of the moment or decide at supper time to take in a movie together the same evening. What a treat!

In addition to the joy of these long standing friendships has been the profound experience of mending some broken relationships. Being away and only visiting from time to time, meant insufficient occasions were available to invite over a couple who through misunderstanding were alienated from us. We were unable to have them over for coffee or a meal to try to begin to build with one another, once more, the trust that unfortunate circumstances had eroded. Now we are home and we can create opportunities to open our home and our hearts, and choose to put aside whatever it was split us apart on that day long ago.

I wondered if it would seem strange to leave my children behind, as we returned to the location that once was home for all of us. Yet the place where they are in their own journeys means that they cannot come home just now. Even that somehow seems right. They need the space to make their own lives and their own homes, so that when they come to ours they will not have to resort to a role that no longer fits them. It was clear when we left and they were so busy that they did not have time to linger in visiting with us, that they had taken wings and were living their own adult independent lives. After all, that was what we raised them to do.

The other reality that brought some trepidation was to leave elderly parents, no longer able to completely care for themselves and thus dependant on the caregivers at the long term care facility where they live. The grace they offered in giving their blessing to our decision to return to the place that is home for us, touched me so deeply. Their unselfishness drew me closer to them in heart while the miles separating us increased.

Coming home has always been a beautiful concept in my imagination. It is returning to the place where dreams began, where hope was palpable and where love ideally and for many of us in reality was the atmosphere that nourished us.

In the intervening years many early dreams shattered to subsequently be replaced by dreams we could never have anticipated. Over time, hope has been buffeted and almost extinguished some days, yet it bravely continues to face each new dawn. Love has matured from a secure refuge to a giddy feeling finally metamorphosing into a deep commitment that holds steady when all else is brought into question.

Coming home is much more that physically relocating Coming home is finding again the place where my heart and my mind are attuned with who I am and where I am. With the Apostle Paul, I can say, “I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation….” When that is so, I am home, wherever I am.