Edina Morningside Community Church
| Today’s scripture reading: Exodus 16:1-18 |
Sermon audio: |
“We live here now, though we always meant to leave.” So reads a line in Gillian Wegener’s poem entitled “Chorus”, which describes how that which is at one time strange becomes home. She continues:
We never meant to stay.
This place was marked as just for now, as stepping stone,
as temporary on our well-drawn maps.
But for one reason or another, years pass
and we find ourselves hot-stepping with jobs and kids
and this and that and a million little possessions.
I love the way that she describes how inertia anchors us down. Anyone who has ever moved parents after forty years in one house knows this is true. Addresses quickly become habitual, then the only place that’s ever felt like home. Wegener captures the magnetism that familiarity possesses, because you don’t know when, as she says, “various wayfarers… will stop for lunch and find themselves staying for years’ worth of dinners.”
Pastor Oby Ballinger 