My friend Linda, who teaches first grade, told me about an interaction she had with one of her students on the first day of school. Accustomed to going home at noon in kindergarten, Ryan was getting his things ready to leave for home when he was actually supposed to be heading to lunch with the rest of the class. Linda asked him what he was doing. "I'm going home," he replied. Linda tried to explain ...

In many ways the Pixar's animated film Wall•E is a story about coming home. It tells the story of a lonely robot who for 700 years has been cleaning up the trash left behind by humans on an abandoned planet. Wall•E stands for "Waste Allocation Load Lifter–Earth class." While we are never told so, it is likely that Wall•E is the last operating robot on the planet. All of the human ...

At my daughter's elementary school musical, the printed program noted: "This musical was originally written for 15 actors, but it has been adapted to accommodate our cast of 206." You know what kind of show this was. No-cut auditions, no performer left without something special to do. They danced, they sang, they delivered lines, and somehow 206 children graced the stage that night.

It was not a short ...

A few years ago, ChristianityToday.com asked readers to share how much their mothers and grandmothers meant to them. In response, Bill Fix, of Taylor, Michigan, shared a moving testimony about his mother's faithful witness:

[Mom] grew up around the coal mines where her daddy worked, deep in the mountainous regions of Virginia. She came from a large, poverty-stricken family, so she learned how to be ...

Heading home to California … a friend and I passed through the Dallas–Fort Worth airport. On the way to the connecting gate, we heard loud patriotic music playing and saw a group, mostly women, wearing colorful hats, cheering, and waving American flags. The troops were coming home, and here was their welcoming committee.

Two women encouraged us to grab flags and join in. We were early for our ...

A few Sundays ago, I was heading home after preaching three times. I was tired and looking forward to opening my laptop and reading my favorite blogs—particularly ones focused on missional theology and leadership. Just then I received a text message from a friend. He was inviting me to a club to see a band with a number of non-Christians, including one I had been trying to build a relationship ...

My youth group was hundreds of miles from home on a mission trip in New Orleans. We were piled in the van on the way back to the motel when someone yelled out, "I get the pay phone first!"

"Why?" another kid asked. "Who do you need to call?"

"It's Father's Day, dork!" came the reply.

Father's Day. I hadn't thought about that in years. As everyone scrambled for coins and planned out a calling schedule, ...

On the wall of what my grandmother called the "sitting room" of her antebellum home in South Carolina, was a constellation of family portraits—old pictures of my uncles and aunts, my cousins, grandparents and great-grandparents, a genealogy in photographs. In the very middle of the cluster, in the place of honor, was the portrait of someone I did not recognize. It was a sepia-toned, Civil War-era ...

The winter of 2009 brought heavy snowfalls to Chicago, and at one point the snow had piled up over a foot deep on the roof of our two-story home. Then we had a thaw. One evening when I returned home from work, I noticed that a thick sheet of ice and snow was hanging over the edge of the roof like a glacier hanging over a cliff. Our driveway runs right alongside the house, and one of our cars was parked ...

The Waltons was a popular television series in the 1970s that told the story of a large family living in Virginia during the Depression era. An episode from the show's eighth season, entitled "The Lost Sheep," focuses on Erin Walton (Mary Beth McDonough), the fourth oldest of seven children. She has been dating a young army officer named Ashley (Jonathan Frakes) off and on for a few years. While on ...