This world is not my home I'm just passing through
my treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue
the angels beckon me from Heaven's open door
and I can't feel at home in this world anymore.

So wrote gospel songwriter Albert E. Brumley.

The older I get the more I feel the truth in those words. We are sojourners in this life, temporary residents who soon will be gone.

The older I get the more those words don't sit right. They are close to the truth and drastically wrong. We are sojourners, yes. Like Abraham we walk the length and breadth of a land of promise not yet ours. We feel like strangers not because we don't belong here but because the power, prestige and wealth this world craves are, in the Apostle Paul's eloquent words, a crock of dung. They are, it must be said, most inviting dung, except that the more we have of them the more they smell like death.

We were created for this world, we are part of it; we feel it in our bones. The first two chapters of Genesis tell the story. God created a good earth and put us here to take care of it. We blew it, deciding that being children and friends of God wasn't enough. We wanted to know what God knew and be in his place. Dumb. We traded the garden for the crock.

Then we hid, because seemed like a smart idea at the time. But God came looking for us. He still loved us, strange as that may seem. The rest of the Bible tells the story. It's a good read.

The story concludes with the riot of color we know as Revelation, the last book of the Bible. Our final home is not somewhere beyond the blue, but here, the place we started, but a here made new.

In the meantime, we are sojourners, walking the length and breadth of the land because it really is ours, just not yet. We walk with eyes wide, seeing the beauty along with the sorrow, for we are loved.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (Paul, in his first letter to the new Christians in Corinth.)
"Through a veil"

(Not quite sure what happened with this photo, but it seemed right for today's post.)

Yashica-D TLR
Kodak TMax 400 120 roll film
Epson Perfection V500 Photo scanner