Walking through Denver International Airport is like an homage to all the places I have lived and been. B28 Honolulu – where I live for now. B20 San Diego – where I was only a week ago for Comic Con, and a month or so before that for work. B24 LA – a passthrough on many of my travels, but also a visit with my family almost ten years ago (the only memory one of crazy traffic packed between the twin beauties of mountains and ocean.) B18 Reno – where my family took a train trip to visit my mother’s friend when I was young. B26 Washington-Dulles – near my previous life in Northern Virginia, where I have flown through, worked, met old friends who I found were no longer friends in the seeming blink of an eye. B23 Sioux Falls – where I graduated high school then drove in a camper with my grandmother to Alaska to escape. B30 San Francisco – where the girl I wish I knew how to love still lives with her family. I still think of her often. And somewhere out there, within less than an hour’s drive of Denver are many friends I have made and memories in Colorado. B25 Minneapolis – the last place my best friend from High School lived before we lost touch ten years ago. I wonder where Brian is now.

               It feels like so much of my life inheres in the liminal spaces, train stations, lobbies, highways, byways, backroads, trams, and airports. Where I am is either a terminal between or a transport between. The whole of my existence has a sense of senseless movement. Even if I stand still, the terminals move around me. People, planes, trains, automobiles, and the unseen yet tangibly felt flow of time is a cold, enervating river.

               I wonder if our deepening sense of loneliness is sourced in these sourceless masses of movement, the terminals that lie since they are not the true ends of anything, merely pauses in the pathway. To reach the true terminus – the end – seems desirous. Perhaps it is my seemingly endless movement that makes me desire to complete things quickly. I am tired of the travel, the movement, the weary wanderings. I want to make an end, to have an end. Yet my life seems closer to a series of disconnected points in a cosmic terminal, stepping from one door to the next. No real start, no real end, no direction – rather pulled in every direction at once.  

               This terminal feels more like a mausoleum to my dead past than a pathway to my future. I am traveling from a wedding in Sanford, FL, where a man I met in Colorado, but stayed with in Kansas City, married a girl whose family originally came from some other place I do not know. Intersections and departures. B10 would take me back to Houston, a pass through on many previous journeys.

               B11 heads to Tampa where I have spent time for work and was endlessly frustrated by the flat waters of a clear ocean bay hopeless in its tranquility. Behind me is B7 to Las Vegas where my sister and brother-in-law live with my two nieces, a third on the way, and where my oldest niece asked me last week why I had to leave and I almost lost it, felt my knees weak, ready to collapse right there on the living room rug.

               I am more convinced every day that I am fragile like flash paper waiting for just a single spark to vaporize my being. Sometimes it feels like the only thing holding me together is a blackhole sadness in my chest which refuses to let the pieces of me escape its gravity – but I know that to be overly dramatic foolishness. The only thing holding me together is the Lord Himself, Christ by His Spirit who has deigned to dwell in so ramshackle a soul and temple as this, though I trust He will make it beautiful in His perfect time.

               B8 is Boise, the only place along the whole B terminal I have seen that I have not actually been to or passed through. I am both curious about it and disgusted at the thought of seeing one more new place without someone to share it with as if each new place is actually a burden to be carried that I need help with.

               I want so badly to go home that the very word home has a musical ring in it – a longing too deep for words. The concept of home has taken on a kind of mythical quality to me – perhaps because I have no idea what it means, but at its mention I have to fight with tears. I don’t have a place I can really call “home.” I have a place to sleep, by the grace of God, but home is concept almost foreign to me – a distant, fleeting, legendary, beautiful thing too impossible for me.

               I once was a tree planted that hungrily reached for the depths of the new soil but was uprooted and replanted. In new earth I stretched out again, but slower than before. Then again, and slower. Again. Slower still. The most recent planting has been a creeping, tentative, wandering thirsting, fearful of the pain of another uprooting if I delve too deep or grow too tall.

               It would be easy to think that there is nothing redeeming in this woeful wandering, but the Holy Spirit indicates otherwise in Hebrews 11 in the oft called Hall of Faith, “These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.”

               Maybe you are out there, like me, hoping, longing, in fact begging for a home – for some stability.  I cannot promise that we will find such a thing on this side of eternity, but God has promised something better by far. In John 14:1-3 “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.”

               Despite the pain and loneliness of my wayfaring lifestyle over the past fifteen years, I can and should be thankful for the great reminder it has been that we are strangers and sojourners on the earth, passing through only for a time until our Lord finishes preparation for the eternal home we will enjoy with Him. Whatever stability I feel I have lost, and long for, is a potent reminder of the promise of God that there will be a true home, a true city, and an eternal unity with Him in His house. Is not that worth the waiting through these light and momentary afflictions?

               I earlier used the analogy of a tree being planted and uprooted multiple times, but that is a false analogy.  It is not I who is planted, but Christ, the root of Jesse, into whom I am grafted as a branch in His vine. While I may be moved from place to place, there is nothing that can sever me from that root, from the eternal, grounded, fundamental goodness and love of our gracious savior. By His immense mercy and love we “now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree.” (Romans 11:17)

               Whatever the case for you, friends – whether you long for some sort of traveling adventure, are thankful for a stable earthly home, or anywhere in between – let us never forget that our true home is to come. We catch glimpses in the Church, in Godly families, and in faithful friends, but the fulfillment will be greater by far than the foretastes. Persevere. I say this more to myself, perhaps, than you, but persevere.

               I started this post in a depth of despair, in spiraling complaints which I need to confess and be forgiven of, but here I end with gratefulness overflowing that we serve a good Lord who is willing and able to do impossibly more than we imagine. He is faithful when we are faithless, gracious in our weakness, and, in Himself, the truest home we will ever and forever possess. Praise Him today, and let not your hearts be troubled.