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Your anger has turned away
And you comforted me. Isaiah 12:1
Read Isaiah 49:7—13
I am part of a humanity that has evolved so many ways of being lost. Wherever I am I can always find in me a nostalgia for somewhere else. Even if I could return again to the place of my upbringing, or even if I could return to the time of my upbringing, didn’t I even then long to be somewhere else that was more fundamentally home? Didn’t I, even as a child, threaten to run away from home because somewhere else would be better? For so much of its life Israel lived in exile from home, dispossessed, victims of oppression and war. The Good News here is filled out with pictures of the ways that surround us when we are going to our true home.
Loving God, when I call you ‘Father’ I know that you are the true source of all my longing. You are the end point of my wandering, and coming to you is always a home-coming. You welcome me not as an alien but as a son or daughter, and your welcome is filled with overwhelming joy, as though you share in the very sense of homecoming yourself.[1] I thank you for all that speaks of these things on the way, for prayer such as this, for communion, for songs, for the blessings of daily life, for the mountains that break forth into song, and the friendships that comfort. I hold before you for your blessing those I love who have not yet found this, who are searching, but have not yet found you, and do not yet know their true home.
[1] Luke 15:22-24