I was given
permission to share this precious writing by an excellent young author.
He Briefly
Thought Of Home
By Rylie Demers
He was born
beneath a sky that seemed to tremble.
The stars glimmered like distant
lanterns, as if heaven itself leaned down to see.
His mother held him close, whispering
old prayers into the night air. Her hands shook, not from cold, but from the
weight of the small miracle she cradled.
The world was quiet except for the sound
of breathing; Hers, his, and the wind slipping softly through the cracks of the
stable.
He grew slowly,
the way light spreads across the morning.
He was gentle, the kind of child who
spoke to animals and believed the wind could hear him.
He liked the smell of bread baking, the
warmth of sunlight on the floor, the sound of his mother humming while she
worked.
When storms came, he ran outside to meet
them, laughing, his hair plastered to his face.
When he returned drenched and smiling,
she would scold him softly, drying him with her shawl.
“You feel too much,” she would say.
“Even the rain finds a home in you.”
He would only smile, eyes wide, as if
feeling were the greatest gift of all.
He followed his
father into the workshop, where the air was thick with the scent of sawdust and
cedar.
There he learned patience.
He learned to smooth roughness, to fit
the crooked back into place, to make broken things whole again.
His father’s laughter filled the room,
deep and kind.
When he taught the boy how to plane
wood, he said, “Creation listens to the heart that shapes it.”
The boy listened. Always.
When his father
died, silence moved into the house like a shadow.
The tools hung untouched.
The wood waited.
But one morning, his mother found him
there, shaping a block of cedar as the dawn spilled through the window.
Her tears fell quietly.
“You have his hands,” she whispered.
“And his love.”
Years blurred.
He became a man with shoulders like his
father’s and eyes like his mother’s; Gentle, searching, always carrying
something sacred and unseen.
He built tables where families shared
bread.
He repaired broken doors, carved cradles
for new life, built chairs for the weary.
His work carried warmth.
Each piece held a trace of him,
something soft, like love that had soaked into the grain.
He never turned
anyone away.
A widow who could not pay, a child whose
toy had broken, he gave, and gave, and gave again.
When asked why, he only said,
“Because the world is heavy enough. Let what I
make lighten it.”
In his late
years, the world began to stir around him.
He left his home and took to the road,
walking with the kind of certainty that comes from sorrow and hope mixed
together.
He found others, men who were lost to
the world.
Fishermen, a tax collector, a zealot, a
skeptic.
He called them friends. They were human,
but so was he.
He tired. He
hungered. He laughed until tears filled his eyes.
He missed home.
He loved them not for who they were, but
for what they could be. He saw them as God saw them. He saw what they were
supposed to be, before the fall of humanity.
They argued and
misunderstood him.
They wanted miracles while he wanted
their hearts.
They failed him again and again, and he
forgave them before they even realized their faults.
When they fell asleep during prayers, he
smiled.
When they panicked in storms, he reached
out his hand and steadied them.
They did not know
what he truly was.
They only knew that when he was near,
they felt lighter, as if something inside them remembered how to breathe.
Sometimes, when
they slept, he sat awake, looking at the stars.
He thought of his mother.
He thought of his father’s laughter in
the workshop.
He thought of home, the smell of cedar
and oil, the sound of his mother’s voice saying his name as though it were a
prayer.
He missed it more than he could ever
say.
Then came the
night the world turned.
He prayed beneath the trees until his
tears burned, and his heart broke under the weight of what he knew must come.
His friends slept nearby, too tired to
keep watch.
He loved them still.
Even when one betrayed him with a kiss,
he called him “friend.”
The dawn that
followed felt hollow.
They dragged him through the streets
while the sky grew heavy and gray.
He said nothing.
He had always been gentle with words.
And then, they
brought it to him.
The cross.
Two rough beams
of wood, freshly cut, raw, splintered, smelling of earth and sap.
He looked at it and felt his chest
tighten.
The scent rose up around him, and
suddenly, the noise faded.
He was back in the workshop.
His father was beside him, smiling
softly.
His mother was calling him in for
supper.
The air smelled the same, wood, dust,
and warmth.
He thought of laughter, of bread, of the
clumsy arguments of his friends.
He thought of every table he had built,
every cradle, every door.
Every life he had touched.
He reached out
and touched the beam.
The grain bit his skin.
The smell filled his lungs.
Home.
He looked at it not as a prisoner, but
as a carpenter. His eyes, even through the haze of pain, traced the wood, the
knots, the rough edges. The corners were jagged, the joinery careless. It was
built in haste, without tenderness, without respect for the living tree it once
was.
His fingers
twitched with the old instinct, to sand it smoother, to balance the weight, to
bring out the beauty hidden in the wood. But this was not a creation meant for
beauty. This was a weapon made of what he once loved.
The beam’s
surface was cruel beneath his touch, biting at his skin like thorns. He knew
the type of wood by scent alone.
He had worked with it countless times
before.
Once, he had used it to craft cradles
and tables, things that held life.
Now it would hold death.
He thought, This
is not good work.
And the thought broke him more than
the pain did.
Because he could
see what it could have been, the symmetry, the balance, the grace in the
design, and for a moment, he almost wanted to fix it.
Old habits die slow.
Love for creation does not vanish, even
when creation turns against you.
They lifted it
onto his shoulders, and he fell beneath its weight.
But he rose again.
He always rose.
Through the blur
of pain, he saw her, his mother, standing in the crowd.
Her eyes wide, her lips trembling, her
hands pressed to her chest.
For a moment, he was her little boy
again, running home in the rain.
And she was still calling him back
inside.
He took another
step.
And another.
Each fall drove splinters deeper.
Each rise brought back the scent of the
wood, the same scent that had once meant creation, not destruction.
When they
fastened him to it, he breathed in that scent again.
Wood. Earth. Home.
He thought of his father’s hands guiding
his own.
He thought of his mother’s shawl drying
his hair.
He thought of his friends laughing
beside a fire, too human to be holy and too beloved to be lost.
And even as the
world darkened, even as breath left him slowly, he still felt love, for all of
them, for everything.
Because love, once made flesh, does not
die.
It lingers in the grain, in the breath,
in the air.
He breathed in
the scent one last time.
He thought of home.
He thought of mercy.
He thought of the way wood smells before
it becomes something new.
And as the sky
split open and silence filled the world,
he whispered forgiveness, not as a
command, but as a promise.
Because even a
cross, to a carpenter,
still smells like wood.
And for one last,
trembling heartbeat,
he thought of home.