The Country Ahead

Track twelve opens Movement IV, the homeward movement, and the album lifts back out of the minor key into a bright traveling song. There's a better country up ahead, and we are walking on. After the honest grief of the last three songs, the record turns its eyes up the road.

The whole song moves. It is a pilgrimage, and the verses walk it. We are strangers here, we are passing through, we never meant to stay - the leaving. The road is long, the road is hard, and some have walked it lame - the long middle, with the promise threaded through it that not one pilgrim walks it lost, He calls us each by name. And then the country comes into sight: now and then the clouds will break, and we can see it plain - a city with its lights turned on, and a country with no pain.

This is Hebrews 11, the men of faith who lived as strangers because they were holding out for a better country. And the bridge does the thing that keeps a pilgrim song from being only wishful. They walked their whole lives, looking on, they never reached the gate - they saw it from far off and waved. But the One who walked the road ahead of us did not leave it bare. He went to build the rooms Himself. The destination is not just a place. He is the country there. So we are walking on, and the comfort under every hard mile is the last line - the Lord is already home.