There it was. Everything I had longed for in my homesickness, but at an impossible distance.
My childhood home rested as it always had on the hill overlooking North Race Street. Its brick walls were the same as when I’d run my hands over their surface as a child. The front porch, in all its craftsman-style familiarity, invited me to clamber up its steps as I had after so many long school days. Even the centennial Japanese Maple on the front lawn waved its long limbs in a friendly sort of way, the occasional crimson leaf joining its fellows on the street where I stood. Against the backdrop of the painted porch was a green Philadelphia Eagles banner hanging from its rafters. Only, my family definitely didn’t follow football. Someone else was living there—this was no longer my home.
I had become so familiar with this house that the idea of “home” would reference it for what felt safe or cozy. Every creak of its floorboards had been memorized; the familiar clunk-clank of the boiler. A smell, seemingly out of nowhere, would bring me back to its vinyl-tiled kitchen or the raised beds where I’d spent so many summers pulling weeds among soft-soiled rows of basil and green beans. Or, in particularly sad moments, I’d think back to the safety under the covers of my childhood bed where monsters and bad school days couldn’t get me. But no longer.
Hopeful Homesickness
There’s a kind of restlessness for every season of our lives. Even the places where we’ve felt most at home can be places of disappointment and, often, places where we longed for more. I suspect this is why the Preacher reminds us, “Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this” (Ecc. 7:10). The wise man recognizes that even the best of times aren’t the final destination: a new roof will one day need repairs, a full house will soon empty, and even the brightest Christmases can so often be tinged by sadness and unfulfilled desires.
Safety, companionship, and joy—all those things that we associate with what home should be—are good things. But like a song that seems to stop and start, its minor chords stretching and building, our lives can sometimes feel like they’re stuck in that tension—like they’ll never reach that resolution for which we hope. We find that nothing in this life fully satisfies our longing. Yet, as C.S. Lewis famously remarked, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
Those who became Christians later in life might feel this in particularly acute ways. So many of those things that we once enjoyed become less to us when God gives us a new heart. Many of the friends, companions, and family members with whom we once shared the most intimate part of our lives are suddenly strangers to our most fundamental identity in Jesus. And, almost out of nowhere, we discover that Christians we’ve known but moments share a bond that is deeper than years—deeper even than the blood of our biological families. We become “elect exiles” (1 Peter 1:1), longing for something beyond this world— a world that is somehow, strangely, no longer our home.
Home At Last
With a new heart comes a new kind of longing: it’s a restless, pilgrim, heart. Though, not without hope. It anticipates a promised home where earthly sadness, loss, and decay will never reach (Rev. 21:1–4). And so we learn to cry out with the hymn writer: “O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, our shelter from the stormy blast, our eternal home.” We come to understand that, for the Christian, the idea of home ceases to merely be oriented around a place, but a person (1 Peter 1:3–5; Heb. 11:13–16).
You see, heaven isn’t home because of its pearly gates and streets of gold. It isn’t home because it’s the place of eternal rest for the saints and angels singing tumultuous, ground-shaking, praise before the throne of God. It isn’t even home because sin is gone. It’s home because Jesus is there.
Jesus knows what it’s like to weep (John 11:35). He knows what it is to feel like this world is not his home (Matt. 8:20). He, more than any, knows what it’s like to long to be with those whom he loves (Luke 22:15–6) and he goes to prepare a home for us (John 14:3, Heb. 11:16). The fact that Christ suffered in familiar ways validates our pilgrim experience of this world (Heb. 2:17-18): the difficulties of this life are real. Yet, the hope that Christ is our true home won’t banish those feelings of homesickness. It isn’t meant to. At least, not yet.
There’s an important purpose to the sadness that comes with the loss, disappointment, and change of this world. Pain and longing are meant to point us to the reality that things are not yet as they ought to be. Homesickness beckons us to remember that this place—this world—is not our home. But knowing that Christ is our home guarantees that we will not feel this way forever. One day, all homesickness—indeed every single one of our not yets—will be wiped away with Christ’s own hands (Rev. 21:4). He is our God, our help, our shelter—our eternal home.
