God's Welcome

7 pm, a light misting rain and a setting sun, the team gathered at the up-til-now Masso home waiting to welcome the Johnsons.  Jack and Julia and Ashley and Anna have posted welcome signs and decorated the porch, Loren has a full-team dinner cooked and keeping warm in the oven, Nathan has pushed the electricians and the house-crew to be finished and ready for this moment.  We look up, and there is a brilliant full-sky arching rainbow, fully visible from start to finish, spanning their entrance.  Then we hear Scott's horn, and he drives leading the way up the hill, followed by the Johnsons in their car, through the rainbow and into their new home.  Scott jumps out with the new black lab puppy he and Travis picked out yesterday evening.  As Amy notes, could their life not have been full and complicated enough with 23 bags, 3 kids including a not-quite-4-month old, a new job, a new home, a new country?  But the puppy makes a house a home, and Lilli is clinging to this little guy for dear life.  The whole group spills out, slowly, gathering shoes and emerging from seat belts, watching the last color of the rainbow fade in the evening light, welcomed by neighbors, and entering their new home.  Patton is immediately mesmerized by a toy rocket left by Gaby, and delighted with the "Cars" sheets on his bed.  There is much chatter and laughter, going from room to room, the sense of a year-long journey of faith finally ending there.  

Not ending, of course, only beginning.  Just as Noah's landing from the ark was not so much the end of their survival of the flood disaster, as it was the beginning of a new life in a new land, a holy freedom to walk out into the world and live for God, under His promise to restrain the consequences of sin, to give us all space and grace to plunge in.