a bit of my father in me..... {roots or wings?}

"All who wander are not lost." -J.R.R. Tolkien

i took my children to the movies this weekend...the older ones.  dropped them off and picked them up.   once home, one remarked of another:

"mom, he cried during the preview of the Hobbit."  

i smiled. 

yes, Tolkien turns 'round our soul and draws us to places unknown...   i remember living in berkeley four stairwells up, reading for the lost-count time the nobility of stryder... closing the last page i walked out and up to our roof at night...sighing star ward, wondering where is nobility in our age? where are the disguised heroes? why do we long for what we cannot see?  searching for something we can't quite describe. 

"He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart;" Eccl 3:11

Tolkien is right, "all that wander are not lost."  we are longing for the beauty and eternity of God.

and we find a glimpse in unexpected places...or overwhelmed in the crashing of God's beauty in nature.



via pinterest

 as my son longs for the unfolding of Bilbo's story on the wide-screen,  today i long for the ocean.  the waves crashing..the sand below..the salt on the air....  

i have always dreamed of living by the ocean.  work, school, habits..livelihood has me inland.   but my heart is by the sea...

i think part of my hankering for a vintage shasta or relative thereof, is my desire to wander out into God's nature....

today...the day of love...i think of the love of beauty God puts in our hearts...the longing for eden....the desire {being made in his image} to create as our creator....   my son who chose to write a song for his girlfriend as his heart-day gift....my daughter who loved making her valentines and staging them beautiful in a basket overflowing with purple and red tissue paper...their momma who feels a day without making with her hands, is a day wasted....

we long to see and make beauty....  our king, our Lord...is enthralled with our beauty within....he put it there.... 

his plan for us was eden....robbed of that by a deceiver...he loves us so much he could not stand us missing eden....  so he took his best, his only, his son....and his son, one in love with his father, for the joy set before him...the joy of us being brought back to eden, endured the cross.....

so we wait....   we wait for eden....  wandering this earth looking for a glimpse of his beauty....  not lost....just waiting...  because you see, he loves so much...that he waits, for the fullness of time....for each to have a chance to accept the path back to eden....the path that starts at the foot of a cross....and wanders on heavenward.

"all that wander are not lost" - some are on a mission.