For a moment, as he stood there, he wondered again about the world they had come from, and if they would ever find it. In what direction it lay, or how one got there, he hadn't the slightest idea.I recently started to read the novel Escape to Witch Mountain, about two young siblings from another world who search to find their real home. I'd read the novel as a kid and the film adaptation is one of my favorite childhood films, but I recently picked it up again in anticipation of the Disney remake (although perhaps I'm just setting myself up for disappointment). I was delighted as I ran across the above scene on the first page of the book--because it reminded me of how I often feel myself.
"Maybe," Tia had once said, "all we have to do is climb a certain stairway, or go around a strange corner--and there it'll be."
"Just like that," he said, laughing.
"Why not?" she insisted. "We know the kind of place it is. It's full of magic and music--for that's the only kind of palce we could have come from. So why wouldn't we have to find it sort of magically?"
--from the opening chapter of Escape to Witch Mountain by Alexander Key
I've blogged before about the sensation of coming across a moment that reminds me of or spills from the land from which we came: in my son's words, the wind, bugs or armadillos and spiders. These moments are like walking around the corner of a building and bumping into God. After a brief, unsettled sensation, I remember where I am. I remember where I really, truly live and breathe--the land for which I was made. That’s a moment when I inhale clean, sweet, wide-open-spaces air. A moment of stabbing joy, because I remember who I am and for what I’m made. It’s a taste of the Kingdom in which I live and the heaven I long for. It is real-ness. Light. And love.
This is the land--this "far country"--for which we were made. Tony and Tia's conversation reminds me of that, of discovering the place I came from in the most ordinary but unexpected of places. It's one of those amazing aspects of that already-but-not-yet life, this middle-of-the-Story living. Only unlike the people and world from which Tony and Tia come from, the Kingdom isn't separated away from the rest of this one. It is spreading through and taking root here-and-now, bringing the world back to the way it was meant to be. Amazing.
(Image: mine)