Lost In The Move--Wandering Desolate Places

The list is long. The change is much. The places are many.

I adjusted to it. Moving every year in school, meant I rarely took final (or semi-final) exams. It meant starting over. Then starting over again. Change was moving, and moving was always.

Friendships ended about the time they began. The next move promising to be better than the last. But they never were and yet my hope continued for it's promise.

Moving so frequently (every year or less) growing up, had become the great escape. Each next place the new adventure. Exploring it's surroundings and settling in for a brief stop.

All the years of dangling from house to house, city to city, hit me as a senior in high school. I was graduating with total strangers. Wasn't this year supposed to mean something? No shared memories, no enduring friendships, no "I remember when we were in 3rd grade", no familiar roads leading to that night of graduation. I felt the loss.

It's funny how life catches up to us, when we let it. I'm living near two of those stops. One is down the road, the city of my church, where I also first received Christ. A place off a main road.

The other stop is here, where I now live. This farm. It's the only constant location I've had in all my years growing up. I visited here often with my family. Then as an adult, it was like a solace of quietly rocking with my Granny and catching up on all the small things in life.

Coming back to the Lord as an adult, I realized even more how much I've missed in others. Perhaps I didn't feel I had much to offer or perhaps I didn't see the point in investing in something so brief.

With Easter approaching, so many things come to mind. Grace, sacrifice, shed, alive, fear, love, darkness, elation, and home.

I've been grounded. Firmly planted and rooted in good soil. My wanderings were numbered. From the places where I was scattered, He brought me back into His fold. In His loving care, He delivered me home.

We are grafted to Him and in Him is also His family. No longer idling wandering, the cross makes a home. He gives us our dwelling place. Where love desires to keep His word and the Shepherd's love keeps watch, the flock. Home. It's more than where the heart is, it's where He is.



"Jesus answered and said to him, 'If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.'" John 14:23

"'Indeed I Myself will search for My sheep and seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock on the day he is among his scattered sheep, so will I seek out My sheep and deliver them from all the places where they were scattered... 'I will seek what was lost and bring back what was driven away, bind up the broken and strengthen what was sick'" Ezekiel 34:11-12&16

"They wandered in the wilderness in a desolate way; they found no city to dwell in. And He led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a city for a dwelling place. Oh, that men would give thanks to the LORD for His goodness.." Psalm 107:4 & 7-8

"You number my wanderings..." Psalm 56:8

Ps. Christ has blessed me with some dear sweet souls of friends. Ones I never had the time to invest when I was younger. Where there was once desolation, His Presence now dwells. He redeems. Present tense. Because His love continues and I'm without words to fully express the depth of it.