There’s a video that’s been making the rounds on the internet this week of Astronaut Christina Koch’s homecoming, her true homecoming. In it, after nearly a year in space, she and LBD, her dog, see each other for the first time. It’s a joy-filled video with LBD running in circles, Astronaut Koch falls to her knees and you hear her little dog, in barks, welcoming her home.
This video came at the end of a week I’d been thinking about home. I’ve prayed, this week, the words of Psalm 102. Intermingled with its personal lament, there’s a longing for Jerusalem, devastated and far away after the Babylonian conquest. Your very stones, the poet says of their homeland, are precious. Imagine, even the rocks, those small pieces of earth that we kick aside as a nuisance on the road, have become cherished pieces of home.
Thinking about home always makes me think of the old saying I was brought up on: Heaven is our real home. This earth is just a temporary place for us. We are just strangers and aliens here.
Wiser minds than mine have written how incorrect this statement is. In fact, Heaven, according to Scripture, is the in-between place, the place we wait between our death and the Redemption of All Things. In Heaven, we’re looking forward to coming back here. This is not a place we hope to escape but a place to which we will always long to return. In fact, in the time we and those who’ve gone before us wait for the moment when all is made new, we may find ourselves declaring, like the Psalmist, just how precious its stones are to us.
Perhaps I should also note that stones have also been a part of this week. The previous owners of our house filled the beds around our yards with rocks, and not the small decorative ones but fist-sized and colored brown and tan. Since the summer, I’ve been slowly replacing them with mulch. As we had a respite from rain last weekend, I was out bagging up these stones before dragging them to the curb. And, as I hoisted their weight over my shoulder, I’ll admit I found nothing precious about them.
But as the week went on I got to thinking, what it would take for me to treat these rocks like precious jewels? If I were away for months, if we were evacuated and settled far from here, what would I feel when I returned? Would even the things I find less than beautiful transform into something I would fall to my knees and gather up in my hands?
And what of them? What might happen if even these mundane and annoying parts of this world—my home—were treated as if they were fragments from a holy place. Would they, inanimate and silent, react to me?
Would even the very stones begin to cry out to welcome me home?