Before anything else: God loves you whether you are close by or far away, and he never loses sight of you.
Have you ever seen a bird's nest up close? It is made of little twigs, way up high, and it is really small.
It looks like a plain little house, but it does three very important jobs. It keeps the chick warm when the wind blows. It is the place where the mother bird brings the food. And it is the address, the place the bird knows how to find when it gets dark.
When a chick is away from the nest, it gets cold, it gets hungry, and it doesn't know where to go. All at once.
Now here comes the best part. Your nest is not the building and it is not the couch. Your nest is the people who notice when you are not there.
Do you know how you find that out? When you stay quiet in your room for a long time and somebody comes to check whether you are okay. That is the nest working.
And there is one thing that makes a nest strong: telling things. When you tell somebody how your day went, you are flying back to the nest.
Jesus said something beautiful about this. He said that birds have nests, but that he himself had nowhere to lie down and rest. He gave up his own nest to go and prepare a place for us.