Today we covered Chapter 19 of The Story which covers the return to home from exile for the people of Israel.  We wanted to create a moment today that would resonate with people about returning home and hopefully help people get a taste of what it would be like to return home as the people of God did.

We decided to find an old abandoned home where we could shoot a video with a voice over.  We ended up finding a home off of I-15 just outside of Barstow, CA. We later added the following as our voice over:

Imagine what it would look like to return to your home after years away . . .    Who would be there? Would it still smell the same, feel the same or look the same?   Maybe that’s why they say, “You can’t go home again”  I remember returning home for the first time after years away, after my parents divorced.  Everything had changed. The memories I had of that place and what was real where strangely in conflict. What I remembered and what was real had changed.  The tension of where I had been and where I was now almost overwhelmed me.   Now, imagine being the Israelites.  Imagine returning home after a journey that took 70 years.  70 years.  Imagine leaving your home at the age of 10 and not returning until you were 80.   Everything had changed. Everything.   The place you once loved is now a hollow shell of what it used to be.  The walls you had built with your bare hands now stand burned and broken.  The remnants of prior lives now lay strewn about the yards and street The  The smells that were so familiar have been replaced by the stench of burnt wood and dust.   How many Israelites even remember what their home looked like? How many were born on the journey? How many arrived back at “home” and muttered, “This is it?  This is what we have been looking forward too for years? This is …Home.  We are all on a journey.  A journey through life.  A journey in relationships.  A journey with God.   The journey is long and winding, It climbs mountains and crosses deserts, It wanders and meanders, sometimes it takes us far from home…  Tim Keller says this,  “Home is a powerful but elusive concept. The strong feelings that surround it reveal some deep longing within us for a place that absolutely fits and absolutely suits us, a place where we can be or perhaps find our true selves.  Yet it seems that no real place or actual family actually totally satisfies these feelings or yearnings.”  And home rarely looks the same when we return, especially the longer we have been away.  But perhaps home is where we started and this long and winding journey we are on inevitably brings us back towards home…   Back to our true home… God, at Home in us. 

View the final product here:  https://youtu.be/GaZ9eYl391g

Our Creative Team decided to do a Beatles tune after the video called “The Long and Winding Road” – We made an arrangement of our own that was scaled back a bit from the original with it’s orchestral score. We had a female vocal lead, acoustic, bass, drums, and keys. No BGV.