Ha ha. The text editor rendered the title 'more final rejections.' Might be something in that.
It's been five years since I was in New Zealand, Aotearoa as the Maori call it: land of the long white cloud. My cheeky sister calls it Aorta-roa: land that captures your heart. And it does.
It was a coming home in multiple ways--and in that sense, perhaps, a reminder that we're never fully at home wherever we are. There's always some unrealized longing hovering at the periphery of our awareness. And when we unexpectedly stumble across what we didn't until that moment know we were missing--like the intensity of light playing on wind-roughed water or the briny smell of rocks at low tide--we experience the unparalleled delight of coming home.
Such moments don't just happen in New Zealand, though what better place to have them! They've happened on the drive past lush, rippling cornfields into Stoughton, or the descent on County Route B which looks down on Lake Kegonsa.
And the coming home is not just with places; it's every bit as much with people: hugging my strong adult son after years apart, laughing till the years flow with kiwi Christian friends of yesteryear, kissing my wife after a three week absence, sitting down with my great staff team to talk of my travels, opening up the Word with the wonderful church family we've been privileged to be part of in Stoughton these last right years.
Each event, in its ordinariness and its specialness, is a little coming home. A little longing fulfilled. A little taste of grace that points to the ultimate encounter with Grace and the realization that all our desires, known and unknown, find their culmination and rest in the One we shall soon meet face to face.
I know of few Scriptures as deep and as lovely as this:
Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. - Psalm 90:1
