home on Despair

ONE VOICE: Joel 2:13 Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful ALL: We drift away from our true home We forget we are Your beloved We forget we are not God Rend our hearts, O Go...

Precious Lord, take our hand, Lead us on, help us stand; We’re tired, we’re weak, we’re worn; Thru the storm, thru the night, Lead us on to the light, Take our hand, precious Lord, Lead us home. The o...

Ancient lens What's the historical context? A Song Celebrating the Return from Babylonian Exile The book of Ezra recounts the return of 50,000 exiles and their entourage from Babylon after Cy...

Advent 2023: Make some noise! Echoes of a Dream AIM commentary Ancient lens What's the historical context? A Song Celebrating the Return from Babylonian Exile The book of Ezra recount...

A prominent citizen in town was dying. As he lay in his lovely home, the best doctors surrounding him, he whispered, with a note of despair, ‘I’m leaving home, I’m leaving home.’ Across town there la...

May those without hope take heart in you, O Christ. May those with no home find shade at your right hand. May those near the end see beginnings; may those at the last become first. At the foot of y...

In the final pages of his great epic The Lord of the Rings, J.R R. Tolkien writes of his heroes, Sam and Frodo, and their desperate quest to reach the cursed Mount Doom to cast the ring of power, a de...

Failure is a gift. When we are forced to drink the dust of our idols, we can begin to turn our sights toward home.

There is no object of desire quite like a house. Few things . . . are capable of eliciting such urgent, even painful, yearning.

No matter how much the world shatters us to pieces, we carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home and that beckons us.

For as long as there is a compassionate Father, there will be a home, a table, and a feast. This was Israel’s great consolation: exile was the middle act of the drama, but it was not the final scene.

Maybe home is nothing but two arms holding you tight when you’re at your worst.

Our hunger is the exile’s hunger, but it is also the first step in our homecoming. We hunger, and in doing so learn the shape of our emptiness is the world’s great emptiness in or to prepare room for ...

Great and gracious God, we have run after things and others instead of coming home to You. We have lived as though we were the centers of our universe. We have avoided the harder issues in life so o...

Home represents humanity’s most visceral ache—and our oldest desire.

One burden of homelessness is this: you’re always a stranger, counting on someone’s good graces.

I do not understand how anyone can live without one small place of enchantment to turn to.

Advent 2020: Tear Down the Heavens God Builds the House Updated & expanded for 2023 AIM commentary Ancient lens What's the historical context? The Ark of God The ark of God tra...

Home shall men come To an older place than Eden And a taller town than Rome. To the end of the way of the wandering star; To the things that cannot be and that are, To the place where God was homeless...

Preaching Commentary In Israel’s tribal society, redemption was the act of a patriarch who put his own resources on the line to ransom a family member who had been driven to the margins of society b...

A distraught man furiously rode his horse up to John Wesley, shouting, “Mr. Wesley, Mr. Wesley, something terrible has happened. Your house has burned to the ground!” Weighing the news for a moment, W...

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel focuses on the language associate...

May you refuse to do battle against the parts of yourself that need love the most. Set down your sword. Say hello to every shard. Hello, grief. Hello, sadness. Hello, anger. Hello, madness. ...

In Israel’s tribal society, redemption was the act of a patriarch who put his own resources on the line to ransom a family member who had been driven to the margins of society by poverty, who had been...

There is a deep longing in every human heart to return to our ancestral home. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sing about this in their song “Woodstock”: “We got to get ourselves back to the garden.” T...

If you could reduce the gospel to one word, most scholars would choose metanoia—the Greek word translated “repentance” in the New Testament… Most of the time we translate both “meta-noeo” and “meta-no...

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

Prayer of Adoration Lord – You are good …and Your goodness knows no bounds. When we were lost, You sought us out, found us and brought us home. When we were alone, You came near to us, and You gave ...

Before Seattle resident Edith Macefield died at age eighty-six in 2008, she refused to sell her house to developers for the $1 million they had purportedly offered. Macefield wanted to die at home. Se...

If anything, there appears to be an inverse relationship between our growing obsession with the home as a totem object and the disintegration of families that has become the chief social phenomenon of...