Shade Tree Wisdom 7/7/09

There’s just something about Home. It’s nice to travel, to visit relatives, to visit sights and see the Grand Canyon and maybe London, Paris or Rome and Venice, but Home, we just feel some ties there that nothing else can replace.

Here, in this place, we feel comfortable. Here is our favorite chair, and our Bible lies right at hand. Books are scattered about, and there is a clutter we find soothing. This place calms the spirit; we fit in. This is Home.

Oh, it may not look like much to others. It’s not pretentious, not the greatest or best looking, but to us, it simply is Home. It’s our place.

These thoughts came to mind over the Fourth when families often spend time together, enjoying the visiting, travelling miles to get there, fitting schedules to meet this need for it. Simply because of the pull that home exerts.

Then, who hasn’t learned, or read, the poem. Well, here it is again.

Breathes There The Man
(Excerpt from “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”)

by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land?
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
From wandering on a foreign strand?

If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell.
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;

Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor’d, and unsung.

We Christians, on the other hand, belong, for we are the Children of God. So our home is here where He is ever with us, and then, eternally, with Him in heaven. God bless our home.

GPD 7/7/09