The time was getting closer and closer to my Grandpa’s retirement, the time when they planned to sell their house in Pennsylvania and move,and they still didn’t have a place to live.
Finally, one day, they were in their real estate agent’s office and they saw a picture of a house that looked familiar. It looked familiar because it was a house in my neighborhood. In fact, it was across the street and three houses away from my house. They asked their real estate agent about it. How much was it?Could they go and see it?
Not a lot of time passed between the moment they realized that house was on the market to the moment that they were signing on the dotted line, buying a house that was, for all practical purposes, right across the street from ours.
For me, it was a dream come true. My grandparents were right across the street. No one had to drive me to go and see them. Anytime I wanted I could run across the street and spend some time with them. I stopped every day on my way home from my school bus stop.I would have snack with them and we would talk about our days. My sister and I had sleep overs there. We trick or treated at their house. We saw them almost every single day, unless they were traveling or we were, although, we often traveled together.
For all of us, their home was a second home.
And when they were older, when I had gone away to college, to seminary, to the home I made with Britton after we were married,my parents could more easily help to take care of my grandparents as they aged, than they could have even if they had lived on the other side of town. And I still saw them a lot, for as long as they lived. When I went home, for school breaks, for summers, for vacations, and once I lived in Connecticut again, just for visits, for a long time, when I went home, I had two homes to go to, my parents’ house and my grandparents’ house, both places where I had grown up.
The kingdom of heaven is like my grandparents’ house. The kingdom of heaven is like a place of welcome, of joy,of love, of peace. A place where you don’t have to worry. The kingdom of heaven is like that. Thanks be to God. Amen