“This world was never my home.”

I have always had a restless, wandering spirit; looking for, I now know, a place of contentment for my soul.  This world has never been my home.  To me, it is just scenery passing by as I travel along the road of my life.  From time to time I pass a place and think “This place has promise, I’ll stop here for a while”, but alas, it could not hold me.  The water always seemed too shallow.
For the last sixty years of my travel, I have had only one companion, my wife Carolyn.    I am her world and as her world turned she moved with it. How blessed I am to have her with me.  I trust no one else. 
There was a place where once we stopped.  Oh, how wonderful it was.  I felt I had arrived home, there in the African bush, a hundred years from any place.  This was a place of beginnings.  I felt as if I had been made from this very soil. 
The Southern Cross was the cross on the steeple of my church. I understood the songs of the birds, baboons were my squabbling neighbors.  The swishing noise in the grass warned me of the Black Mamba or Cobra on the hunt.  The lion and leopard respected me as I did them.  Hippo’s, always angry and aggressive, prowled the river banks.  And the Crocodiles who, lying in wait for the thirsty, have no rules.
I loved it there, in central Mozambique, along the Indian Ocean, but sadly it was not to be.  I found this place too late.  Eventually, my health drove us back to the USA.
We are both approaching seventy-nine years old.  I have a bad heart.  Broken by what, just bad health or regrets?  My travels have stopped.  My health has anchored me.  Now my past is able to overtake me.  I have time to reflect on past sins, as do other people.  “Remember what you did to me thirty years ago?”
Soon, a month, a year or two, who knows, my life will end.  The bruised souls of people I injured will be free of me.  But for all of that, there are those that love me still.  Those that know the inestimable value of being forgiven and the wondrous liberty of forgiving others.
To my wife and companion of my travels, I say don’t let my leaving distress you.  We have been separated for short periods before.  This journey of ours through eternity is really just getting started.  I have a sneaking suspicion that what I've been looking for is just over the next hill.  That makes me smile.

Marshall Kimbrough-Warren