Keep The Home Fires Burning

Keep the home fires burning, while your hearts are yearning.

Though your lads are far away, they dream of home.

It was a crisp, cold autumn evening in the midst of October’s crimson and gold, as I wended my way home from an evening of feasting with friends. And oh, what a feast it had been. Tables heaped high with pots of fragrant soup, baskets full of bread, and too many salads to count. My cup runneth over. And music – passionate, joy-filled songs of worship filling a backyard garden with praise. If worship could be seen instead of heard, how brightly must that tiny yard have welled with light that night.

It had been glorious, a taste of what awaits us in eternity. And now I was driving the dark country roads home through a dusky autumn evening, up, down, and over hill, between vineyards, and fields of grain, and hills thickly wooded with pine and fir. House lights, steady and bright, glimmered out from between the trees.

There is something magical about driving along winding roads through a country of gentle hills at night. Lights dot the undulating hillsides, above and below and all around you. Fog drifts through the trees, the clouds coming down to touch the tops of the mountains. I was struck all at once with a simultaneous pang of homesickness and deep contentment as I drove.

It was because of those luminous home lights, burning so steadfastly. They hinted of warmth and cheer and happiness, of families gathered with laughter around laden dinner tables, of fires roaring truly and well, of safety against the darkness of the weary world. In that moment, it seemed that those with such a home on such a night need not fear much of anything. What a grace it would be to the eyes of a tired traveler, to come at the long end of a bitter and back-breaking journey within sight of the faithful fires of home.

Fires that would not still be burning, if those who tended them had not been faithful. That choice need not necessarily ever have been made. An author that I love, Wendell Berry, says in his book Life Is a Miracle, “Farms, families, and communities are forms of art just as are poems, paintings, and symphonies. None of these things would exist if we did not make them. We can make them either well or poorly; this choice is another thing that we make.”

Those who tend those fires chose to make them, and then to keep them well. They keep the fires burning, even though it means going out into the dark cold to chop and carry the wood to feed them. They tend the children whose presence brings riotous laughter to the home. They craft the soup and knead the bread that sustains all who enter their doors. They did not have to make this choice, but they did, and the world is a brighter and more beauteous place because of it.

May all who journey far from home know the joy of returning to a place of feasting and laughter. May they know the quiet peace of entering in to roaring fires and lilting song. May they taste gladness, fierce and bright, pushing back the darkness. Joy, burning brightly ‘round the borders of our hearts as we fence out for the night the vast echoing cold and darkness of the world and turn our eyes and hearts inward to those we love.

May you all know such a home, dear friends.

“In returning and rest you shall be saved; In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.” – Isaiah 30:15