Home for Good by Danny Sims

    Last week I went home.  Kind of.

    I walked the rural Kentucky acres of my childhood.  I strolled past the live oak trees that formed the first baseball diamond I ever played upon. I stood at the creek bank where my brothers and I hunted crawdads and fired our Red Riders at the imaginary bad guys who threatened to overtake our home place.  I walked through the twenty acre wood and saw the remnants of our tree house, long ago the mighty fortress of the Sims boys.

    The giant hills where I first rode a bike were not nearly as tall as they were thirty years ago.  Our house was not nearly as big as it was when I was a kid, and the huge carport my dad added by the side door has been rebuilt for only one car!  The backyard’s been reduced from its football field glory days to nothing more than a small area of grass between the house and one of the old barns.  Even the old barn has lost weight and slimmed down!

One day we will be there...

    The apple orchard is gone.  Where hundreds proudly produced Granny Whites and Delicious Reds, the plot of ground where they stood could hold no more than a dozen or so trees today.  It disturbs me that the present owners have cut the apple trees down, but they really went too far in shrinking the land!  The walk to the creek, as with the trek to the woods, once took most of an afternoon.  I can remember taking a sack lunch in the event I became hungry along the way.  This time my young son and daughter went along with me and we made the round trip in less than two minutes!

    How is it that things change so!  Why don’t things stay the same?  I would be much more comfortable going home and home looking like home.  I’d be more comfortable if the old saying, “The more things change, the more things stay the same” were true.  It seems to me, the more things change, the more things look a whole lot different than I remember.

    I’m struggling to accept what you have probably known for a long time. There is no such thing as a permanent home in a temporary place.  The world we live in is changing.  The lives we lead change.  The houses we live in change.   This side of the Home of God, nothing is the same today as it was yesterday.  Ask the Floridian whose house burned, the Californian whose home slid off the side of a muddy hill, the Tennessean whose place was vacuumed up in the tornado, or the kid whose old Kentucky home has mysteriously grown smaller with time.

    Only God’s Home remains the same.  One day we will be there, Home with God for Good.

HEARTLIGHT(R) Magazine is a ministry of loving Christians and the Westover Hills church of Christ.
Edited by Phil Ware and Paul Lee.
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Article copyright (c) 1998, Danny Sims. Used by permission.
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