“The land cannot be sold permanently because the land is mine and you are foreigners—you’re my tenants.” Leviticus 25:23 (MSG)

As I write this morning, I’m sitting on the back porch of our house. The most unique part of our backyard is a privacy fence that surrounds it with a beautiful arbor in the middle which fills each year with climbing vines the produce bright orange flowers. There is a stone path which wanders through the arbor and a brick stair which takes us up to the backyard of Craig and Sue, our neighbors around the corner. The story goes that the previous owners of our house and the previous owners of Craig and Sue’s house were friends. The ladies got together every morning for coffee. Instead of walking around the corner to one another’s homes, the men made a beautiful shortcut for expedited travel between the two back yards.

It is now many years and multiple owners later. The fence and the arbor are showing their age. Yet, they stand there as a memorial to countless mornings of morning coffee between neighbors. They recall the lives, the families, the life stories which precede Wendy and me on this land, and in this house. Likewise, I look at the majestic, sprawling oak tree in our front yard and think of the sapling it must have been when the land our home sits on was purchased by Dominie Scholte and his wife Mareah in 1847. I think of the multiple children she buried not far from here.

We are such short-sighted people. Our brains become so easily fixated on our ourselves, our possessions, and the microscopic blip on the Earth’s timeline we occupy for seventy or eighty years. We think we own our land. We think we possess it and give in to the illusion that we are centers of our own universe and everything is about us. And yet, in a few short years there will be someone else sitting on or near this porch. Someone else will own this land. Tom and Wendy Vander Well will become forgotten names on an abstract, and our lives will become whispers of the forgotten past to those who inhabit the bricks and mortar we now “own.”

Thank you, God, for the reminder this morning. This house and this land are yours. They were yours before I got here. They will be yours after I leave. I am a grateful, and hopefully faithful, tenant. This world is not my home. I am simply a wayfaring stranger, in a land I’m passing through.