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"Someday I'll move to a place without a 16-wheeler's help."

-by Ruth Senter

How can it be that everything we own—the accumulation of fifty-some years of living—is at this very moment, crawling along through rush-hour traffic, up Interstate 294 toward Chicago's northern suburbs? Life, for me, has suddenly been reduced to 16 wheels and a truck-bed.

"Do you realize," I say to my husband as we follow the green and yellow moving van, "that if that truck rolls down an embankment, our entire life rolls down the embankment with it."

I am not amused by my words. But I am struck by the thought of how tied to the temporal I really am.

We arrive at our destination, but it is not yet home. The house seems strange and unfriendly. There is no connection. I walk through the empty rooms with a cool detachment. This place holds nothing for me; nothing of me.

Oh, but it's a different story when I start to unpack the boxes; when I can touch my great-grandmother's stitchery, hang pictures of the county back east where all my relatives live, and put away a china plate my dad had used as a boy. Then I begin to feel connected. The house now holds my treasures. My heart has finally begun to move in.

Such is the normal way of change. You must unpack the boxes before you're truly home.

But still I wonder. Where is my connectedness, really? With accumulated things that fill this earthly house?

"For where your treasure is, there will your heart will be also" (Matt. 6:21).

Jesus was speaking of another home, another place to which I will someday move.

And in that final move, I won't need a 16-wheeler to haul all my treasures.

Lord, keep reminding me.

-Ruth Senter has written ten books, has two grown kids, and travels with her husband, a seminary educator.

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine (formerly Christian Reader).
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