Thoughts on Eternity

I feel as though I have been swarmed under by a Tsunami of nostalgia.

The last few days were spent at a conference at Disneyland...my favorite vacation spot and home to many, many, many family memories.
As if that weren't enough...
I also spent a couple hours with my brother who delivered a package from my mom: an entire shopping bag full of pictures from my childhood and...letters from several girls I dated while I was in college.
Nothing worth weeping over, no long held regrets of any kind, just a LOT of memories.

Now, back up one week earlier...
I found myself in an odd combination of enjoying my new job, enjoying our new home, realizing things were moving in a great direction and...sad for the neighbors, schools, teams, friends, we'd left behind in the old neighborhood.

How can it be that while I can look back on the old and not have major regrets, look forward from the new and be excited, that I can feel a sense of sad nostalgia?

Then it occurred to me.
I wasn't meant to live with "endings".

If we had somehow managed to stay put, in the garden that is, then we'd have been set for eternal life living with God. That was His original intent for us...that we would live in eternity with Him. The fall has just put us in a place where the path back to that is a bit longer.
We wouldn't have endings there...endings are issues of time so, in eternity, time without end, there would be no endings. Nothing to "look back" on as being "over".
It's hard to wrap the mind around it.

It makes me wonder though if a part of the sadness that I associate with those bitter-sweet moments of nostalgia is really a deeply rooted sadness at missing the garden in which I was intended to live.

I wonder if what we're really missing is Home.