in memory of Violet Elaine Ringenberg

"If we are in fact strangers and pilgrims here on earth, then we have certain conclusions to draw which concern our daily lives. There is a counsel which is found in most spiritual religions, and indeed also in some philosophies, that we should cultivate detachment. This has not meant, in the minds of the best spiritual guides, that we should wrap ourselves in an inhuman aloofness...or that we should look on life as a spectacle in which we have no vital concern. But it does mean that we should live in this world as if we did not wholly belong to it...It is wise to remind ourselves that even our most cherished ambitions and interests are passing; the soul will grow out of them, or at least must leave them behind.

We look backward, perhaps, at the pleasant days we have known, and we linger in the past, reluctant to let it go; or the present may be so vivid and captivating that we would hold on to it and resent the law that compels us to move on to unknown scenes. But to the pilgrim, these passages should not be wholly sad. We may feel regret, but not desolation...These phases of life are incidents of the journey, but it is the way that matters, not the accidents along the road. Has the time come to move on? Then break up the camp with a good heart; it is only one more stage on the journey home.

One day we shall break camp for the last time in this world and face the final adventure of death. May we then have so passed the days of our pilgrimage, with the Lord of adventurers by our side, that we may reach in the end our eternal home." ~W.R. Matthews

and then home

"To a man of middle life, existence is no longer a dream, but a reality. He has not much more new to look forward to, for the character of his life is generally fixed by that time. His profession, his home, his occupation, will be, for the most part, what they are now. He will make few new acquaintances...no new friends. It is the solemn thought connected with middle age that life's last business is begun in earnest: and it is then, midway between the cradle and the grave, that a man begins to look and marvel with a kind of remorseful feeling that he let the days of youth go by so half enjoyed. It is the pensive autumn feeling that we experience when the longest day of the year is past, and every day that follows is shorter, and the lights fainter, and the feebler shadows tell that nature is hastening with gigantic footsteps to her winter grave. So does man look back upon his youth. When the first grey hairs become visible--when the unwelcome truth fastens itself upon the mind that a man is no longer going up the hill, but down, and that the sun is already westering, he looks back on things behind. Now this is a natural feeling, but is it the high Christian tone of feeling?..We may assuredly answer, No. We who have an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, what have we to do with things past? When we were children we thought as children. But now there lies before us, life, with its earnest work; and then old age, and then the grave, and then home." ~F.W. Robertson