Keys

I wonder how many keys you have on your key ring?  I heard a talk once in which the speaker said that the more keys you have, the more it represents control of your own life.  A child has no keys, neither does a prisoner.  But as an adult we usually carry many keys…to the house, office, car; maybe even to other people’s houses!   As we draw closer to our departure from Nettleham we have begun to realise that we are slowly but surely losing all our keys!  This weekend I handed my little car over to our daughter, Emily along with the keys.  Soon Mark will hand over his chapel key and the keys to the Godpod.  And then, on 30^th July, we will hand over our house keys to the Methodist property steward.  All we’ll be left with then will be the key to Mark’s car and yet in December when we fly out of the UK we will hand even that key over to someone and leave the country with no keys!   We will have relinquished all control over our own lives for a time!

This thought has been profound for us this weekend as we contemplate and prepare for the many losses we will face in the coming weeks and months.  We both feel very unsettled and it is hard at times to focus on things that are happening day to day.  Our house is becoming less and less like a home and more like a shell of a home and we know that from 30^th July we will have no base until we reach our new home in Guyana. 

As we sort out all our earthly belongings and decide whether it is going into storage, being sent out to Guyana, travelling in the car with us for the summer or being given away; as we cancel all our standing orders and terminate all our contracts and commitments we are acutely aware that our lives are about to change in so many ways.  In some ways it is quite liberating to lay it all down and start again without all the trappings we usually hold so dear but in other ways it is quite difficult to come to terms with.

We value the prayers, support and patience of all of our friends and family at this time of transition and apologise if we don’t seem quite with it at the moment!!   A comment in my Bible notes today really struck me.  It said, ‘If you have a home don’t get too settled because actually you are not home yet.’  We know that we have many moves ahead of us in the coming months and years and yet we are always just travelling through.  It doesn’t pay for any of us to get too settled because one day we will leave everything behind and Jesus has promised those who love him will have a room in his Father’s house – then we will be truly home and settled.  And we won’t need any keys!