home

The three girls and I have taken our reading of the true story of prairie-preacher Peter Cartwright from the freezing house huddled by the fire with icicles on all the windows...in just a matter of days...to the grass barefoot, sitting in the sun.  

For our past two weeks the main character, a young boy named Gil, has been consumed with looking for his mother, kidnapped in the war of 1812, his father killed.  Hearing that there was a blue-eyed squaw among the Saukenauk tribe, he lived an incredible and painful life of endless searching and trying to survive. He finally, finally found his mom when he was 16, 12 years of searching...and while Lily, Sofie and Nora were dying to celebrate--his life, surely, finally complete--it was a bittersweet victory.

She had a new husband, several children. She had changed, immensely, and her ways and language and culture were no longer his. She couldn't leave her family to make him the home he always had wanted her to. She couldn't be the family he had been longing for.  She couldn't change the past he had suffered through. She couldn't fix what he hadn't had, and after all that searching and longing for a good and solid and loving home, he left disappointed and aimless.

She survived, and he had found her, but she couldn't heal all the hurts of before or now, she couldn't be the perfect home he'd lived for.

That's when he sought out Peter Cartwright, who had been talking to Gil for years about the satisfaction only to be found in Jesus. "Whether our home is good or bad or even if we don't have one at all, God's whole purpose is to plant within us a hunger. When we're older, we hanker for our childhood home, or we wish it could have been kinder, or we long for what we never had. It's a longing God plants within us, His way of drawing us to himself and peace with Him. God has something better for us--a relationship that's not dependent on creating paradise some place here on earth."

In the end, Gil finally confessed "I want heaven to be my home, I want God to be my Father."

I couldn't help but thumb through the story we just finished this morning again in my mind as I stood in the brown yard this afternoon with our next door neighbor Henry. It was just Thanksgiving that his wife and our friend Mary Jane was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. 

These last months have been filled with the strong medicine/poison of chemo and radiation, treatments, surgeries, standing in the yard in masks, letters, texting, notes and pictures and prayers from the kids, soups, pies, granola, little gifts. She and Nora have a special thing, those two, and most days the house next door finds a little note or picture in bright crayon and big letters. 

The last several weeks the food was only piling up. The last letter was too shaky to read. The last several texts she's been too weak to type back. Time we once found in the yard now found her in bed. A few nights ago she fell, flashing lights in our windows and a scan showing that the ridiculously small amount of food she has been able to ingest through radiation and chemo has been settling not in her stomach but in her lungs.

Standing there with a despondent, skeletal version of Henry this afternoon, home for a few hours to shave and shower and head back again, he talked about all the pain.  All the pain and misery of especially the last few weeks. About the agony of walking alongside his first wife in her battle and death, and now the agony of walking alongside Mary Jane. About the almost unbearable pain Mary Jane is so, so miserable of. 

They've battled very hard, but reality today as the brutal finish seems to suddenly draw near, is that there is still grace, still hope, still healing, still rest perhaps in heaven and in heaven alone. 

Nora thought Mary Jane's home was next door...she has found her there many a time. But what a sacred and watery conversation today about Gil and his true home, about Mary Jane and hers, about all these great disappointments and pain and OUR true home, where pain is no more. 

As I played through this song a few times tonight bedtime, on the same piano Mary Jane played not that long ago, it becomes a part of the almost continual prayers I'm lifting for Mary Jane and Henry.

There is hope for the hopeless

and all who have strayed

come sit at the table

come taste of His grace

There's rest for the weary,

a rest that endures,

Earth has no sorrow 

that heaven can't cure.

So lay down your burdens, 

lay down your shame.

all who are broken, lift up your face,

oh wanderer come home, you're not too far

lay down your hurt, lay down your heart,

come as you are.