The Ninth Day of Christmas. Coming Home

Blooming flowers in winter in front of my childhood home.

Dear fellow pilgrim,

“Are you happy to go home?,” people asked me when we packed up for our sabbatical year in Germany. There wasn’t an easy answer really. Is it easy to revisit the places of your childhood? I know that many of you struggle, as do I. But it is a necessary journey that for many of us comes with baggage we rather would avoid.

So today, on this 9th Day of our journey, when we left my parents’ home with the sight of an early blossoming, I decided it is time to take on the bittersweet journey of coming home.

After all, the Christmas story is a story of traveling, of long journeys, and of coming home. “So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth to Bethlehem, with Mary, who was expecting a child” (“Da machte sich auch auf Josef aus Gallilea mit Maria, seinem angetrauten Weibe, die war schwanger…”).

Have you ever been frustrated by biblical authors who use half a sentence for a journey of a life time? How in the world…