Making it Home

A phone call and my life is distinctly changed this morning because my friend made it home.

Should I cry or should I just sit here in awe of the sinking knowledge?  It’s sinking in all around me in that heavy and wondrous way.  It is filling up my consciousness, and once again I go to the place of profound awareness of the “over-there-land”.   Many just call it home, and my friend made it home. 

A few years ago (and for many years before) she was raising a few chickens in her and her husband’s retired, full scale chicken house operation.  The houses are old now and run down, but all the better for her to enjoy her hobby of bringing up new chics of interesting varieties, rabbits, and pigeons.  She raised pure breed dogs in another old chicken house for some time and she tried her hand at raising a few goats from our place, but that never took off for her.  What a kind, generous, and wonderfully interesting friend she was.  I miss her this morning knowing that she’s gone home.  An achy knowing lingers now that I can’t depend that she is over that north hill doing her thing and being who she was. 

Just a few years ago she came by for a reason I can’t remember now, but visits were always involving our love of raising critters.  She shared with me the extraordinary miracle that had happened to her-- and later, after she’d gone, I cried for joy.  She said she had entrusted her life and soul to Him who holds all of our eternal fates in His hands.  She had “believed unto her salvation” and now knew she was going to heaven.  I remember her mentioning that fact;  she was now going to heaven.  Wow, my friend is home.

They say that home is where your heart is, and it is surely true.   Our life here is like the tender flowers in the springtime field;  here for a little while and then faded and gone away so soon.  I never like to see the flowers go.  Now it is right to be glad that  I saw her blooming here, knew her, and enjoyed some of the beautiful ways that she graced the world just being her.  I'm so grateful to be comforted in these morning hours knowing that she is alive and well beyond this veil of flesh and blood;  she is  home.

For Marilyn