A final passport stamp.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. - Romans 8:38 & 39

My Aunt Lynette was a traveler. Even though she lived right down the road from where I grew up, almost all of my memories of her involve some sort of trip - like the time she took my little brother and I on a train tour through Michigan, or the time she came to visit me at college and took me to a Swedish bakery outside Chicago to buy some limpa bread, or the time she hopped on a bus tour to come see the cherry blossoms (and me) in DC. I have trinket boxes from all over the world lined up on my dresser that she brought back for me as souvenirs.

Lynette was also a photographer, and I'm pretty sure she took a picture of almost every square inch of the Earth that she covered. Almost all of our get-togethers involved looking through her photo collections and, as we got older, sharing pictures from our own travels with her.

That persistent urge to explore the world, to document our adventures, and to share the beauty that we find here is buried in all of us to some degree. It's part of what it means to be human, this often subconscious understanding that we have a limited amount of time to kick around at the dust under our feet before we return to it. As Christians, that urging (what Frederick Buechner would call "seeking a homeland," as in Hebrews 11) is also a reminder that this world is not our home.

Lynette's travels are done for now. She is home.

I don't know much about what Heaven is like. But I know that if Lynette has her way, she's probably not going to be spending much time kicking around those mysterious John 14:2 mansions.  She'll be driving a Buick around the streets of gold.