Bill and I had been away from home about a week, holding services in a church in eastern Tennessee. Our little Suzanne had been as patient as a one-year-old could be. Finally, the last night, we said good-bye to our friends and packed our bags and boxes into our station wagon. I shook hands with the last of the people in the church lobby, then headed for the Sunday school room we had used as a dressing room to put Suzanne’s pajamas on her and jump into my jeans for the long drive home from Tennessee to Indiana.
As we pulled out of the parking lot, Suzanne asked, “Where are we going now, Mommy?” Children of traveling parents ask that question a lot.
“Home, sweetheart,” Bill answered. “We’re going home.”
She clapped her hands and made up a song. “Going home. We’re going home,” she sang until she finally fell asleep.
As we drove away from the city lights and onto the highway, I remembered how safe I felt as a child in the warm cocoon of our family car--heading home. My parents traveled often to conventions and other ministerial meetings. We were gone so often that my mother bought me an extra set of schoolbooks so I could keep up my work. There was something so comforting about finally leaving the place we’d been visiting to head home where we belonged.
Bill must have been thinking about something very similar. “I remember when I was a kid, Mom and Dad would take us to Nashville to the Ryman Auditorium for the all-night singings,” he mused. “I’d beg and beg until Dad would finally agree to make the trip. He’d say, ‘We’ll go, but you better stay in the seat for every bit of that singing.’ I think he was sorry he ever said that when, at one in the morning, I was still there listening to the very last song! And yet I remember how happy I felt when Dad would put his arm around my shoulder and say, “Come on: let’s go home, and we’d pile into the car and head for the farm in Indiana. I was so full of music and dreams about someday singing like that that I wouldn’t stop talking for miles.”
Suzanne had given us an idea for a new song, and her little tune kept going through our minds. Children who have to travel as much as ours did seldom beg to go someplace. Instead, they beg to stay home. Home is the sweetest place of all. They know; they’ve been everywhere else!
In a way we’re all children of a traveling family. We’ve seen some nice places. We’ve stayed in some nice houses. We’ve had some memorable experiences and met some great people. But we really don’t live in those places.
And sometimes the miles get long and the attractions--no matter how exciting--get to be just another county fair. No matter how much we sleep, we don’t ever seem to be at rest. No matter how sweet the fellowship or how pleasant the hospitality, we don’t ever seem to really belong.
But one of these days our Father will scoop us up in His strong arms and we will hear Him say those sweet and comforting words, “Come on, my child. We’re going home.”
