Rev. Dale Edwards: Finding Home

I have a small collection of books on the subject of chickens. One is by a local author and farmer, Jennifer Megysi. (I suspect the author and myself have both been readers of Wendell Berry.) In a book on chickens, toward its ending, the author writes of a night when she and her young son sit on the barn roof, hoping to snipe a chicken killing skunk. But her son is preoccupied because the family cat has not been seen in three days. In his grief he wishes he could also be in the sky to help the cat find his way home.   

We have all possibly looked into the stars, rejoiced in their beauty, or grieved a loss, wondered about eternity, or thanked God for being close. Not long ago I came home late, and like the boy on the barn roof, looked at the stars and wondered not about a cat, but of how people find their way home. How does anybody find their way home without the Christ who reaches for us from beyond the stars? As I proceeded to my front door, looking over my shoulder at the stars, I am glad to be home. I really like the home I own, but I love the home who owns me. Once I prayed the cat would come home, and she did. I have prayed for numerous people to come home; some have, some haven't and some in time, may choose to return. To place a prayer into eternity's expanse, asking that someone else would share the home you found, is like casting oneself into the Holy. 

The older I become, the more the Incarnation and Resurrection stir in me a desire to fall before God, and thank Him that I am home. To paraphrase a lyric, the Word who breathed a hundred billion galaxies into being, is the same Word became flesh and lives with us full of grace and truth. It is delusional to think I can climb onto a star and navigate from there my own way home. It is only the One who created the stars who can reach me, through the greatest birth and sacrifice ever to shake the cosmos, yet in time and history, here is Jesus the Christ, telling me, assuring me, embracing me, that I really am already home.  

"The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us.  We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth."


May the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, rain down his love and grace upon you this Christmas season.

In Jesus name,

Dale