Faraway Home, Part 2

by John Comer

The carts are loaded with trunks carefully labeled WILLIAM JUNKIN, destination CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, USA. They contain whatever is vital for 2-3 weeks, hopefully no longer, while the family sails across the Atlantic Ocean, and whatever will be essential when they arrive.

William Junkin is 45 years old; Elizabeth, 43. Perhaps they realize they are a little old for this sort of thing as the carts pull away from the Irish farmyard, taking them to Belfast where they will sail away to America.

Daughter Margaret, 24, may be thinking of a young man being left behind in the nearby village of Lame. Is 22-year-old William, Jr., already anticipating the land he will be able to own in America? The year is 1820. Would 16-year-old Samuel be daydreaming of some beautiful American girl just waiting for his arrival? And what is Robert, a 14-year-old farm boy, expecting from the trip? Spouting whales? Icebergs? Pirates?

Waiting at dockside in Belfast is the Jane, out of New Bedford, a wellused immigrant ship. (A 1790 Jane manifest, lists 111 passengers age 13 and above, 75 children age 12 and under, 23 of them under two years.) the Jane is old. It will be crowded and unsanitary. It smells already. The food will be poor and the water questionable. But it’s going to America. They go aboard.

From Belfast Lough they sailed into the Irish Sea, through St. George’s Channel, and out into the Celtic Sea. Surely it seemed they had sailed far enough to have gone around the world! Then they entered the great Atlantic, the fearsome likes of which these farmers never dreamed, even when they might have visited the Irish coast at Ballygalley Head, looking across the water toward Scotland. How could one earth hold this much ocean?

Life can be a fearsome thing with extravagant costs. Our immigrant ancestors considered the risk/reward factors, then got on boats and came.

We Christians have staked our lives on what God did through Jesus Christ. It’s a choice we have made. A man on a cross dying between two criminals seems too risky a foundation for many people, and an empty grave sounds too questionable to be believed. But we believe in a God who has the grace to accept us, sinners that we are, made clean by the blood of Jesus, into a faraway home in his new world, a world that may not be that far away after all.