Branching Out

"You are the vine, we are the branches, keep us abiding in you."

We moved. A year later, I still find myself wishing I were back "home." as I call it. The only place where I ever really lived. Forty years of lives and places entwined together. And yet our lives have already been entwined with new lives here, and our friends and family have filled in the empty spaces we left behind. Life goes on.

It's a chilly day in my office and I sit holding a cup of coffee for warmth and stare out the window wishing again for the past. I see a tree, beginning to bud, to leaf out once again and my eye is drawn to a branch in the center of the tree which is dying. It's bark and wood have grown dark, and there are only two or three twigs with half-hearted attempts at buds on that particular branch. All of the rest of the twigs have long ago fallen to the ground. Am I that branch Lord, dying because I don't want to grow , to branch out?