The HGTV Dream Home Sweepstakes is closed to entries for this year.

As far as Wil knows, he and Lorraine will not be the lucky owners of this year’s giveaway, which their website describes as “a grand mountain escape packed with high-end design and located in Morrison, Colorado.”

He knows this because he did not enter to win.

Lorraine on the other hand, did enter, and she’s still holding out hope that we’re about to win the grand prize.

There were a few years when we entered the sweepstakes twice a day on two different HGTV-affiliated websites, imagining winning a home much larger than the one we lived in year-round and making that our vacation spot every year, even if we weren't wild about the home's location or design.

We have yet to win the dream home. All we've won so far is a lot of emails from paint, furniture, plumbing and deck companies.

This year, though, we actually did take a vacation. Before that, it was sometime before COVID that we actually had a real vacation, not long weekends or half days, but a week or more.

So it’s been long enough that we’ve been looking back on that trip, how we took our dog with us and spent most days writing, with breaks for coffee, sweets, ice cream, fixing the car’s dead battery, visiting a health food store to look at vitamins, going to a farmer’s market and discovering a privately run bookstore that was half used, half new, with a little of everything in it. Oh, and that Mexican restaurant that seemed like it was only for Mexicans, but yes, they would take our money if we wanted to eat there.

Mostly, though, in the mornings, we played with words on paper and laptops for longer than we normally allow ourselves. In the afternoon, we traded papers and read what the other had been writing. We’d talk, edit, debate, suggest and then break for dinner.

This might not sound like an ideal vacation to very many of you. For us, it was pretty great.

Being in the middle of a good time made us think about all the other good times we’d had. With the exception of our honeymoon and pre-9/11 trips to England and missions trips, our other top places to stay have been gifts of one kind or another from friends or family.

We have had the privilege of staying in other peoples’ homes, cabins, cottages, whatever you want to call them--friends or family who want to share life with others or bless us with a week of retreat we wouldn’t otherwise have. That probably sounds kind of terrible to those who have vacation memories on cruise ships or the top floor of luxury resorts or excursions.

The element of a home as a gift is something we have become familiar with, always on the receiving end of this sweet kind of sharing. Remembering these places has a beautiful sort of nostalgia because those cabins and homes and lodges come with people attached. They aren't dream homes; they're places of reality. They represent places of hope and rest and work in the best possible context—in the context of people who love us and email “The key is under the mat.” Or give us our very own key to their very own place or entrust us with their lone set of keys for a week.

Along with that beautiful nostalgia and reality comes a deeper longing for a lasting home, no HGTV designed home, but a reality home “whose designer and builder is God.” (Hebrews 11:10). It's not a grand prize, but a great and eternal gift. A home where God himself will be with us as our God, and he “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:4)