The afternoon light was the kind that gilded everything, turning the dust motes into drifting sparks. I sat on the back porch steps, the wood warm and grainy under my palms, and the letter from Corinth felt heavy in my lap, not with weight, but with a kind of luminous gravity. I’d been reading it over and again, this part where Paul talks about our earthly tent.
A tent. Yes, that was it exactly. You don’t need to be a weaver of goats’ hair to know the truth of it. I felt it in the stiffness in my back when I stood up too quickly, heard it in the soft sigh the house made as it settled in the heat. This body, this life—it was a good tent, staked in a beautiful clearing for a while. I’d known laughter here, known love that felt as solid as the oak in the yard. But a tent is not a house. You’re always aware of the canvas between you and the wind, the way a sudden storm can make the whole structure shudder and groan.
Paul called it a *building from God*, a house not made with hands. The words weren’t a blueprint; they were a longing. I watched a sparrow land on the fence post, preen itself with frantic, vital energy, and then dart away. So temporary. So utterly alive. And we are like that, I thought. Fiercely attached to this scrappy, wonderful, fading life, even as we ache for something… stonier. More permanent.
The neighbor’s boy was kicking a ball against the side of their garage. *Thump. Thump. Thump.* A steady, mortal rhythm. I thought of the ‘groaning’ Paul wrote about. It wasn’t just the groan of pain, though heaven knows there’s enough of that. It was the groan of something straining, like a sail full of a wind it can barely contain. This longing for home, for a fit that our current skin can’t manage. We’re all a bit like children who have outgrown their clothes, bursting at the seams with a future we can’t yet wear.
And then the heart of it: *Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.* The old has gone, the new has come. I’d heard that preached with fire, as a sudden rupture. But sitting there, with the sun dipping and painting long, tender shadows, it felt less like an explosion and more like a dawn. It wasn’t that the old things—the regret over that harsh word spoken last week, the grief for my father that still came in quiet waves—weren’t real. They were. But their meaning had changed. They were no longer the final verdict on me. They were part of the story, but not the title. The title had been rewritten.
This was the reconciliation. Not a fuzzy feeling, but a job. A mission. It meant seeing the sullen teenager who bagged my groceries not as an obstacle, but as a tent-dweller, just like me. It meant that the ‘they’ and ‘them’ of the world—the people on the other side of any argument—had faces, and souls, and were loved with the same costly love that had found me. God was in Christ, not counting trespasses. Not keeping a ledger. The very thought of it was dizzying. It re-wired everything. Our purpose wasn’t to be right, or safe, or even just good. It was to be ambassadors. Stutterers for a kingdom we’d only glimpsed, carrying a message of peace that still felt too large for our mouths.
A breeze picked up, carrying the scent of cut grass and distant rain. The ‘thump’ next door had stopped. For all its poetry about tents and buildings, the letter ended in a shocking place: the love of Christ *controls* us. Not just inspires or suggests to us. It presses in, it urges, it compels. Because once you see it—once you really see that one man died for all, so that the living might live no longer for themselves—the axis of your world tilts. Self-preservation ceases to be the main project. The project becomes this awkward, glorious, heartbreaking work of representing that love to other tents in the wind.
I stood up, my knees cracking a protest. The letter rested on the steps. The light was fading from gold to a deep, soft blue. The tent was weary. But inside it, something—Someone—was wide awake, looking out at the coming stars with a quiet, unshakable confidence. Not that the tent would last, but that home was sure. And until then, there was work to do right here in the twilight, with the smell of rain coming, and the whole world groaning, waiting.
