This is the sort of morning you don't take for granted. You sit on the back porch and drink your morning cup slowly. You put your head back and breathe sweet air. You inhale fall. 68 days of temperatures above 100 change the way you love your favorite season. You always love fall, but now you are grateful in any number of ways.

We are leaving last night and the breeze gusts in cool air for the first time in months. I say that I am happy to be a Texan, and I am. (Except I'm still not, technically, a Texan. Small things like driver's licenses...)

I say to someone the other day that all I really want on earth is home, that I always feel unsatisfied without it and he says back that it is refreshing to see the lack of satisfaction doesn't keep me discontent.

And this is true. Truer more than it ever has been before.

The angst in my soul for a home is deeper and more pronounced than it has ever been, but the contentment in my heart is more stayed and solid than it ever has been.

I remember living on Hardscrabble Road and every day I would run past this house on the corner, an abandoned house, and I would dream of making a home there. Fixing it up. Having a garden and a porch swing. Hanging laundry on the line and making homemade applesauce.

Because I thought those things made a home.

I've been longing for heaven these days.

Not in a way that ought to worry you, death doesn't scare me but neither do I relish the thought of just not being. I've just been longing for completeness, satisfaction, fullness, a met expectation. Heaven is the only place where I'm absolutely sure that God will surpass my hopes.

Earth always falls short.

A wise man said to me once: you're always going to be an ambassador, never an immigrant. And those words stay with me, define me, challenge me. He was saying that for some people, earth becomes their home and they become part of it, they plant their roots deep and become what it makes of them. But that will never be you, he said, that is part of what makes you valuable to the Kingdom, that you will never be acculturated--never despise that.

And yet I have.
And sometimes I do.

I've put off changing my driver's license. Time, you know? The lines are so long? The cost? Eh. So many excuses. But the real truth--here's the real truth:

I'm not home yet.

And I want as many reminders of that in my life as possible.