“God’s children belong to a kingdom which is not of this world; they are strangers and pilgrims upon earth…” - John Newton
There are times you can catch real glimpses of it. Sometimes, on a drive through the country, or when I walk through an arbored trail of velvety goldenrod on a late afternoon in September, it feels closer than mere imagining. I feel it when I’m gathered in a room of saints singing ancient choruses from a hymnal, or when I watch a pink sunset like the one last night. When I return to my parent’s house late of an evening and the yellow stove light is left on while supper remains hot on the burner, it feels like I’m playing a game of hot-and-cold, trying to find my way. A voice deep inside nudges me, you’re getting warmer.
What is this longing? It comes on in moments of love and beauty, but it also comes in the face of loss and goodbyes. It is beyond nostalgia, but it bears an aura of the familiar. It promises satisfaction, yet it is a persistent discontent. It is perfectly bittersweet, a feeling of being emptied, and burdened with an undying hope all at once. I can only describe it as a longing for something I cannot realize, but I know I am meant to have.
I think everyone ever born probably has known this feeling. There is an internal human compass to point us back home to the place we were all made for. But the compass is easily broken, and it points us in confusing and disappointing directions.
Only the Christian can make sense of it. The Christian knows he is a “stranger and exile on the earth, seeking a homeland.1” But that doesn’t mean the ache goes away; in the light of what we long for, the ache grows stronger. We were designed for heaven, and nothing but God’s eternal presence will end the search for home.
I think about this a lot, and it tends to come up from time to time in conversations with friends, especially ones who tend to have a similarly romantic view of life. The other day I was talking with just such a friend. We are “phone friends” mostly now, since she lives in a wooded vale hours away and I live here on the prairie, but I still tell her just about everything. On this day, I was expressing to her my homesickness. Not particularly homesickness for a certain place, or even a certain person, and that’s what makes it hard to describe.
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