Joseph Mitchell🥋

Highlands, TX

[Joseph Mitchell🥋 @J_osephMitchell]

@Antonio_Tajani Who gives a fuck? Stfu

[Joseph Mitchell🥋 @J_osephMitchell]

@MrDude079 “It’s alright everybody” 😂 he’s a hero

[Secretary Marco Rubio @SecRubio]

He is Risen.

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

President Donald J. Trump delivers a message on Holy Week ✝️

'Happy Easter to all, may God bless you, may God bless the United States of America.'

[Joseph Mitchell🥋 @J_osephMitchell]

@TeamTalaricoHQ @jamestalarico If that was the truth of who the democrats are today, we would all be democrats BUT that is no longer the democrat party. That is not the trump party

[Joseph Mitchell🥋 @J_osephMitchell]

@FmrRepMTG Our military is filled with wonderful people who would willingly lay their life down for our country and you should be thankful for that, not using it for your political purposes. You are making it worse

[Joseph Mitchell🥋 @J_osephMitchell]

@Mike_Pence Uh wrong

[The Biblical Man @Biblicalman]

There are pictures on my wall that don't exist anymore.

All seven of us. Five kids. Two parents. Two dogs. Taken before the exodus started.

Three of my kids live in Florida now. The oldest two left first. The third followed when he turned eighteen. My wife and I are in North Dakota with our two youngest girls and two dogs who still answer to the names of the ones we buried.

Chester. Ginger. We call the new ones by their names without thinking. Our mouths remember the ghost dogs before our brains catch up.

Thomas Wolfe wrote a novel in 1940 called You Can't Go Home Again. Published after he died. The last lines still cut like a blade:

"You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood... back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

I didn't understand that quote until this year.

My dad was an Army Ranger. Police captain. The kind of man who made you feel like nothing on earth could touch you as long as he was in the building. I remember the smells of my mom's cooking. The noise of me and my brothers fighting and doing dumb things. My younger brother getting caught up in our foolishness whether he wanted in or not.

I remember the feeling of safety. That bone-deep knowing that your father has it handled.

I can't go back there. Those smells are memories. That noise is silence. That safety was a season—not a permanent address.

I'm a child of the 80s. Music was always playing. Always. And now a song doesn't remind me of a time—it relocates me.

Duran Duran and I'm in Germany.
An old country song and I'm in North Carolina.
A 90s track and I'm in Hawaii.

Three chords and I'm standing in a place that doesn't exist anymore.

The other day I was writing. Apple Music dropped in a song I didn't ask for.

"Welcome to the Machine" by Pink Floyd.

The opening synth hit me first. Then the lyrics.

Welcome my son. Welcome to the machine.

I stopped typing. Looked at that picture on the wall. All five kids. My wife next to me. And the thought came uninvited—are we inside a machine? Some system grinding us through its gears while we smile for photos we'll weep over later?

I grounded myself fast. The Word of God is my anchor and I don't drift long.

But the thought stung.

Because this week "Christian social media" was buzzing about the Grammys and Kid Rock and the TPUSA Super Bowl halftime show. Everyone had an opinion. Everyone was outraged or celebrating or performing discernment for an audience.

And all of it, every take, every hot post, every argument, reminded me of one thing:

We are not home.

Wolfe was right. You can't go home again. But Wolfe didn't have the answer. He diagnosed the ache. He couldn't name the cure.

Solomon could.

"He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end." —Ecclesiastes 3:11

That word—world—is olam in the Hebrew.

Eternity.

God set eternity in your heart.

That's why the pictures make you ache. That's why old songs teleport you. That's why you call the new dog by the dead dog's name. That's why you sit in a quiet house remembering when it was chaos—and realize the chaos was the gift.

You were built for a home that doesn't decay. Where time doesn't steal your children or silence your kitchen or bury your dogs in the backyard.

The ache isn't a malfunction. It's a homing signal.

"These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth." —Hebrews 11:13
That's what Wolfe felt but couldn't name. That's what Pink Floyd reached for but couldn't grasp. That's what every 80s kid feels when the right song plays and the chest tightens and you're eight years old again for three seconds before time drags you back to the present.

You can't go home again.

Because you were never home to begin with.

"In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you." —John 14:2

He's building it right now.

And when you walk through that door, you won't have to leave again.

I wrote the full version of this tonight on Substack. It goes deeper. If this hit you in the chest, go read it.

@biblicalman

[Joseph Mitchell🥋 @J_osephMitchell]

@dillondanis .

[Joseph Mitchell🥋 @J_osephMitchell]

@NFL The only thing that could have made that halftime show better is if @ICEgov would have storm’d the field right in the middle of it 😂 #BadBunny #SuperBowl

[Joseph Mitchell🥋 @J_osephMitchell]

@SInow 1

[Joseph Mitchell🥋 @J_osephMitchell]

@RGIII Bout as bad as you as a QB.

[Joseph Mitchell🥋 @J_osephMitchell]

@jjhenry21 @LeVeonBell I guess I give people too much credit thinking they would be smarter than that and won’t kill themselves but we live among a lot of idiots, mostly liberals.

[Joseph Mitchell🥋 @J_osephMitchell]

@ClownWorld @RGIII we gotta get people to stop doing this

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