A Better Country

Track seventeen is the closing hymn, and the way I have always wanted a hard record to end - plain, warm, the grief fully lifted into something a congregation could sing. It takes its text from Hebrews 11, the men of faith who confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth, who lived and died as strangers and did not count it loss, because they had seen a better country.

And there the album makes its final turn. All this record I have called myself a homeless, campless man, as if it were a wound, as if it were a thing to mourn. But the chapter in Hebrews has another word for a man with no country here. It calls him a pilgrim. The homeless and the campless were the pilgrims all along. I was never lost out here. I was only on my way. Homelessness was never lostness. It was travel.

So the closer gathers up every image the album carried - the cold yard, the shut doors, the long road, the reproach - and lays them all down. There is a city that was built for strangers, raised before I drew a breath, with a place in it for every man the camps would never keep. And the God who let the camps turn me out is not ashamed of me. He has gone and called Himself my God, and He has gone and built the town. That is where the whole record rests. Outside the camp, I found the road, and the road ran home. There is a better country. And I am almost home.