75 Songs Says it All

I have slept, if it can be qualified as such. Sitting up, struggling to keep the short thin blanket over my bent and crumpled limbs. I have an air pillow, a neck pillow, a squashy pillow (travel size) to pad myself in pseudo comfort, and as I dream perhaps I'll shake this economy class crunch of limbs and forms of personal space.

Now I am one hour from US soil. I can't wait. This is a long long way to fly and looking out past the wings of my 777 transport, I see glimpses of how high, how wide, how deep His love is for His children.

What a two weeks we've had. We've laughed, cried, advised, prayed, ministered and saw the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Once again, my emotions are raw, my heart exposed and laid bare, in need of a good cry, a tender hug, and still a 'one' who understands the suffering in the willingness to be separated from self.

The plane approaches the California shoreline. 'Remembrance of Things Past' playlist is serenading me to home ground. Peter Gabriel sings, 'I Grieve... still life carries on'

High up in the altitude, my souls cries out too. 'I Grieve for you.' For those thousand goodbyes I saw. For the 'when will you come back' questions, for the eyes that peer in quizzical darkness 'why, what, when's' to go unanswered until the next time.

Their days will progress, sometimes worried as they watch their country sink into civil war, terrorist attacks, and the threat of military action. There is a terror under the surface of the conversational courtesies.

For our last meal we stopped at the Hilton for half-price pizza. The newspaper sat on our table with the bold headline ˝PEACE OVER as Terrorists Strike'. Our waitress looked down and teared up. The blast occurred two blocks from the Hilton. All she could get out was 'this is very bad'.

I return to a different but equally difficult war on the home front. My youngest son is struggling with demons of his own doing. Hope is being stolen with no respector of nationalities or nations, political allegences or personal histories.

We are in a war – something that keeps me somberly looking to the days ahead with anticipation at the floodgates opening up on ministry for the End Times being magnified. My '75 Songs That Say it All' well, they are a sentimental remembrance of things past –

but also serve as a reflection to forget things past, I press on the upward high calling of God in Christ Jesus.