The World Is Your Ship And Not Your Home

“The world’s thy ship and not thy home.” –St. Therese of Lisieux
You may have noticed that things have been more quiet than usual here. It is not by choice. Through a series of circumstances beyond our control, we are in the midst of moving again after having lived in our current home only six months. A number of other circumstances and events have all converged as well, making it difficult to have the time or energy to write.
Now, I don’t say all this to complain. I have been blessed greatly in the past few weeks, stressful though they have been, and in my experience, when God crushes you in the wine press, it is to make wine.
But while we are confident that our Lord is up to something good, I will admit that having to move again on short notice has been disappointing. Frankly, we had planned to stay in our current place for the next several years, even throwing away the moving boxes we had been saving just in case. We have moved a lot in our relatively short married life, and we were looking forward to some stability, which certainly isn’t wrong. But in the words of the great Scot Robert Burns, “the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.”
Yet, there is an important lesson to be learned in such circumstances that is difficult for us to remember when we have the illusion that we are safely in control of our lives: This world is not our home. The saints frequently admonish us to detachment from the things of this world, and they remind us that, while we may often think otherwise, this earth is not our final destination. As St. Paul says in his letter to the Hebrews, the saints are saints because, through faith, “they desire a better country, that