A Thousand Miles of Memory

When Saroo Brierley was five years old, he fell asleep on a train platform in rural India and woke up on a train hurtling toward Calcutta — a thousand miles from home. For twenty-five years, all he carried were fragments of the life he'd lost. The taste of jalebi sweets from a street vendor. The image of a water tower near the train tracks. The faint sound of his mother's voice calling a name he wasn't sure he remembered correctly. Each memory was real but painfully incomplete — a piece of a world he couldn't reassemble.

Then, using Google Earth and those scattered memories, Saroo traced his way back to the village of Khandwa. He flew from Australia to India, walked down a dusty road, and found his mother, Kamla, standing in a doorway. The pieces became a person. He didn't need fragments anymore. She was there — arms open, tears falling, whole and real.

The writer of Hebrews describes something like this on a cosmic scale. For generations, the Almighty spoke to His people in pieces — a word through Moses, a vision to Isaiah, a whisper to Elijah. Each revelation was true, but partial. Then the Son came. Not another piece of the message, but the radiance of God's glory, the exact representation of His being. In Jesus, every scattered word became a living person standing in the doorway. God was no longer speaking from a distance. He had come home to us.