<<ABOUT CATHERINE SIDER-HAMILTON>>
Our grandson Jamie and his family moved this summer to a new home. It’s a lovely house with a screened-in porch and a fireplace and cicadas singing in the big old trees out back. But it is not the home Jamie has known for all his seven years. He loved his old house, a little sunny cottage on a grassy knoll perfect for kids to roll down. He loved his old house so much that one day, when he was about three, he told Caitlin (his mom, our daughter), that he didn’t want to go to heaven.
“But why?” Caitlin asked. “Heaven is beautiful.”
“No,” Jamie said. “I don’t like heaven. If I go to heaven I have to leave our house.”
On the day of the move, the three children and I went to the park. All afternoon, Jamie was very quiet, and when we left to walk home – to their new house, straight up the hill – Jamie said, “I want to turn here. I don’t want to go straight; I want to turn here; that’s the way home.” And it was the way – to the old house. He knew we couldn’t go there, really; he knew we had a new way to walk now, but how he wanted to! How he wanted to go back to the old home.
Having just retired from the church I had served for a decade, I knew exactly how Jamie felt. How often on a Sunday morning have my feet wanted to carry me back to the old home! How often each one of us, stepping out on a new path, into the call of God, feels the pull of the old road, the home we know.
There is a necessary leaving-behind on every new road, even the best ones. Even heaven! Even heaven is a leaving behind – Jamie saw that – the great leaving-behind as the great walk forward, the walk of all walks, begins. For now I see as in a glass darkly, but then face to face: perhaps each of our leave-takings now is practice for that last and greatest call into the presence of God.
But this is the point: it is heaven that awaits us, at the end of all our going. We are walking always into God’s arms. Every new way on which we step out in our life as Christ’s servants is part of this great way, part of God’s call, God’s invitation, God’s hand held out in Jesus Christ to draw us in.
What matters, on every road we take, every turn we make, is that the road be Christ’s, that we walk always toward His call, toward His arms stretched out.
And if it seems hard sometimes to know, hard to see His arms, hard to hear His voice, the road stretching out in front of us unknown, He gives us this gift: He has made our road His.
He has made our road His. There is nowhere we can go, the psalmist says, that is too far for Him. You trace all my journeys and my resting-places; even the darkness is not dark to you, the night is as bright as the day (Psalm 139: 3,12).
Over our path always God’s sun (son!) rises; the sun itself in its daily course shouts God’s hesed, His loving-kindness, His steadfast presence over, under, before and behind all our days. Underneath are the everlasting arms.
And so even in the going, we are at home. What Jamie will discover in his new house is that he is still at home because his family in its faith and love is there. He is still at home; we are all still profoundly at home because we live in the lee of God’s grace, in the shelter of His outstretched arms. Just as in Jamie’s new house the light spilled out of the evening windows, welcoming us that day as we walked up the new road, beckoning him home.
So, too, for us all. There is Jesus ahead of us on the way, light spilling from his outstretched hands, calling us in, calling us home. There He is ahead of us on every way, in every new country, God’s Word rising over us, God’s grace in Christ’s face, saying “I am with you. Come, follow me.”
So the new road is a gift, God’s gift to us in this time, pointing us to Him. The new road teaches us to cock our head and listen, to listen for His Word; to lift our eyes and look, to look for His face; to watch and listen on this strange, hard, radiant way for Him - that our way may be His way, more and more! This is the gift the new road offers; it is the promise in Jesus’ hands.
If I take the wings of the morning
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there your hand shall lead me,
And your right hand hold me fast. (Psalm 139: 9-10)
