The Sunday Letter
There is a moment on these early fall mornings, right before the light, when the whole place goes dead silent. I have been catching it this week, out on the porch with my coffee, the yard still dark and not a sound in it. And then it starts.
The first one this morning was a limpkin, that long wild wail out of the dark that never quite fails to raise the hair on your neck. Then a gallinule answered it from off the other way, the little marsh bird Misti and I have always called the water chicken, just for the fun of it. Then a mockingbird woke up and threw in everything it had at once. And by the time the light was really coming on, the silence was long gone and the morning had come all the way alive, one voice at a time, the way it does this time of year.
Some of it, I am fairly sure, is old company coming back. There are birds turning up again that I had not heard in a good while, filling the mornings back up with a sound I did not know I had been missing until it returned. The cool sends them back down to us the way it always has, and they settle into the same trees and pick the singing right back up, as though they had only stepped out for the summer.
That is one of the quiet things fall does down here. It sends things home. The birds feel the pull of it before we do and answer without a second thought, tracing the same roads their kind have always traced, landing back where they started. But we feel it too, if we are paying attention, and the calendar is honest about it. Fall is the great homecoming season in the South.
It is written right into these few weeks. The high school picks its homecoming court and crowns the queen at halftime, and the old graduates drift back to lean on the same fence they leaned on at seventeen. The colleges throw the gates open for homecoming weekend, and grown men and women will drive half a day to sit in the stands where they were once young and sure of almost nothing. And in a thousand small churches the sign out front reads Homecoming Sunday, and the lot fills with cars that have not turned in there in years, come back for the dinner on the grounds and the singing and a walk out to the graves in the back.
I do not think all of that landing in the same season is an accident. Something in us starts leaning toward home about now, the same as the birds do. Maybe it is the cooler air, or the earlier dark, or just the old instinct that when the world begins to draw in, you want to be among your people when it does. Home down here was never only a house. It is a table, a pew, a stretch of bleacher, a handful of folks who knew you before you amounted to anything and thought well of you anyway. And fall, more than any season we get, calls you back toward it.
So here is the small thing I would leave you with this week. If fall is tugging you homeward, do not talk yourself out of it. Make the drive. Turn in at the old church for homecoming. Sit in the stands at your school for no better reason than that it is yours. And if you are the one already home, keep half an eye on the door, because somebody out there is working up the nerve to come back after a long time gone, and the whole of a homecoming is that somebody was glad to see them walk in.
Take a minute with that today. Then go on home, or leave a light on for somebody who is trying to.
That’s the week. See you next Sunday.
The South, Shared.
Porch Light
A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South
The sun has never once been late. Every hard night anybody has ever spent, every hospital hallway and every sleepless worry and every year that came apart at the seams, has ended the same way: the sky going pale at the edges, right on schedule, whether the one watching had any hope left in them or not.
I wrote up above about homecoming, about the way fall pulls us all back toward home. But I know that word does not fall the same on every ear. For some of us home is complicated, or a long way off, or gone. Maybe this was the year you feel you wandered too far down the road to turn back, or the year that took the home you had. Homecoming is a warm word right up until you are the one who is not sure there is a door left open for you.
So this part is for you, and the homecoming it offers is a surer one than any football weekend.
“The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” — Lamentations 3:22-23
Those may be the most hopeful lines in the Bible, and they were written in the rubble. Lamentations is a funeral song for a fallen city, five chapters of honest grief, and these verses sit right in the middle of it. The man who wrote them was not having a good year. He was having the worst year a man can have, and it was from inside that year that he said it: the steadfast love of the LORD never ceases. He did not write it because everything held. He wrote it because One thing did.
New every morning. Not stockpiled. Not rationed. Not carried over from the mornings you handled better. Mercy gets set out fresh every day, on a schedule no wandering of yours has ever interrupted. The door you are afraid has closed swings open again with every sunrise, whether you earned the night before or not.
I will own my end of this. When I have wandered off, I start figuring the welcome must have worn out by now, because that is how I would do it. I keep having to relearn that He is not like me. No road you have taken this year has moved Him one inch off the porch.
So if you feel too far gone to come home, hear this instead. The oldest homecoming there is waits for the very person who was sure there was no coming back. Grieve what needs grieving, rest what needs resting, and then watch the morning come, because there will be mercy in it, as sure as there is light. That is the promise, and it does not flicker. It is on tonight, and it is on for you.
And if this brought you something today, share it with someone who’d enjoy it too.