The Address She Kept in Her Pocket

For eleven years after Hurricane Katrina swallowed her shotgun house on Pauline Street, Margaret Thibodaux carried a folded scrap of paper in her coat pocket. On it she had written the address — 4712 Pauline Street, New Orleans — as if forgetting the numbers might erase the last proof that home had ever existed. She moved through FEMA trailers, her sister's couch in Baton Rouge, a cramped apartment in Houston where the walls were thin enough to hear strangers weeping. Every night she unfolded that paper and read the address like a prayer.

In 2016, a church team rebuilt her house on the same lot. When Margaret stepped through the front door, she pressed her palm flat against the new drywall and stood there, perfectly still, tears running past her chin. Her granddaughter asked, "Maw-Maw, why are you crying if you're happy?" Margaret whispered, "Because the old thing is finally gone, baby. And this one is real."

That is the ache behind Revelation 21. John saw a vision not of renovation but of complete renewal — a new heaven and a new earth, the first things passed away forever. And the God who dwells among His people does not merely rebuild. He wipes every tear Himself, presses His hand to the place where grief once lived, and declares the old order of death and mourning and pain finished. Not repaired. Gone. And everything — finally, beautifully — made new.