It is wonderful to come home again. But it is also hard.
There was a beautiful tree in the backyard of my boyhood home which after many decades of life is now gone. It has been replaced with a grassy plot of land, The uprooting of the tree makes me feel uprooted as well because I associate it with beautiful moments in my childhood. Across the street, the hundred acre orchard that I tended at the age of thirteen is now gone. There I picked tens of thousands of peaches, and cherries innumerable. There I earned my first wage and used it to purchase my first gold coin. It was there that I did the first interview of my life — with an eighty-year old man who was once the cub reporter that broke the Scopes Trial. It is all gone now — having been replaced by an elite neighborhood of two million dollar homes. I can not bring myself to look at the neighborhood when I drive by, lest the thousands of beautiful memories be sullied.
The world that you knew as a child looks different because civilization and technology does not stop. Time does not stop. This is different from truth — which does stand still. Truth never changes, even when circumstances do. True faith endures, even when it is tested. The same could be said of true love which is eternal — like the love of a father for his son or a son for his father. Truth, faith, and love transcend circumstances, and there is a great comfort in this. It means that there is stability in a changing world.
That is one of the reasons why the pictures we place on the walls and around our homes have such a value to our children. They lock certain moments in time and tie the present with the past. They remind us of the things we treasure deeply and always know to be true — things that time will never change, that reside deep in our hearts and which are most precious to us.
Last week I walked around my parents’ home — the home of my boyhood. I noted the pictures which have been on the walls for decades and they gave me great comfort. They also reminded me of how precious is this present season in life that we share together, and how we need to take the time to memorialize and rejoice in the truth, the faith, and the love that God bestows on us every day.
