Hope for the Homesick
March 20th, 2023 • by Caroline Saunders
It’s an odd feeling to drive up to a place that once felt like home and realize that word no longer fits. We think of “home” as a place, but it’s rooted in a time, isn’t it? I can’t go back to the house where my grandparents once lived and expect to see dozens of photos of family members in mismatched frames lining the stairs. I can’t expect to be greeted with a serving of mac ‘n’ cheese from the blue box. I can’t walk in and bang on the piano like I once did or investigate the knickknacks that lined the shelves. The time has passed. This place is no longer the home it was—not for our family anyway.
Homesickness is a feeling we all carry within us. It makes itself known from time to time, perhaps when we pack up our bedroom to head to adulthood, when we come back and realize we’ve changed, or anytime we change houses or towns.
And yet, homesickness may prick our hearts even as we stay put. Maybe home doesn’t feel safe—or perhaps it is safe, but late at night we worry someone terrible will intrude or someone wonderful will leave. All of it leaves us longing for a permanent, impenetrable place where we are planned for, welcomed, safe, loved, and liked.
We all have stories of homesickness, and that’s why it matters that God has a story of home for us.
“We all have stories of homesickness, and that’s why it matters that God has a story of home for us.”
The History of Homesickness
You know the beginning of the story: like an intruder, sin entered the hearts of our first parents, and they had to leave the paradise of the first home. Once sin and shame came to live in their hearts, homesickness quickly followed. Oh how they must have longed for the peace they once knew, longed to walk with God the way they once did, longed for things to be set right! Haven’t we inherited these longings?
Through the Old Testament, we see God offering his homesick people glimmers of home: the promised land, the temple, the tabernacle. And yet these things didn’t seem to be permanent. What were God’s people to think, for example, when the temple, the place where God dwelled, was destroyed? Eventually, the temple was rebuilt, but God’s glory did not come upon it as it once did. Those who’d seen the first temple wept, homesick like Adam and Eve for the way God once dwelled with them (Ezra 3:12).
The Old Testament closes with deep homesickness. During the intertestamental time, God’s people must have clung to his promises. Perhaps they sang the words of Moses, a man who never had a permanent home, in Psalm 90:1: “Lord, through all the generations you have been our home!” (NLT).
The Hope for the Homesick
As they clung to God’s promises, God’s people couldn’t have imagined that God himself would leave his home in glory to come as a man and build the way home for us. Jesus is the hope for the homesick!
To build the way home, Jesus stepped into the place of the homesick. His childhood was characterized by rootlessness, as his family bounced around from places like Bethlehem, Egypt, and Nazareth. By God’s design, Mary and Joseph started their young family and raised Jesus without the comforts of home.
Years ago, something struck me as I read twelve-year-old Jesus’s words to his parents when they finally found him in the temple after looking for him for days. He said, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49). There’s lots to consider inside preteen Jesus’s words, but that day I had a suspicion: Was there homesickness in his tone?
Whether it was this moment or not, Jesus understands what it is like to be homesick. Hebrews 4:15 reminds us how he shares in our struggles: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” When we are homesick, we can know that Jesus understands this particular ache. All of humanity has experienced this ache, so of course the God-man experienced it, too!
“Through his perfect obedience, his punishing death, and his new life, Jesus built the way home. ”
And yet, while every other human merely experienced it, Jesus addressed it. Through his perfect obedience, his punishing death, and his new life, Jesus built the way home. To the sin that dwells in our hearts like an intruder, Jesus commanded, “Get out!” and endured its horrors himself. Jesus’s disciples must have looked upon Jesus’s body longing for him to dwell with them as he once did. Could they have imagined that days later, he would?
Jesus defeated sin and death—the greatest enemies of home—and when we look to him, we are made new. God the Spirit takes up residence in our homesick hearts, comforting us and leading us as we journey to our truest home.
The Home for the Homesick
The Christian gets to walk in the comforting reminder that longings are arrows that point to God’s promises. We long for a permanent home, and God has promised that one day, Jesus will return and make everything new and wonderful forever. He will dwell with us in full. Until then, we have the seal of the Holy Spirit, a deposit that allows us to practice being at home with God.
Sister, are you homesick? Are you longing for a permanent, impenetrable place where you are planned for, welcomed, safe, loved, and liked? You can know that you are part of a big story of God’s people who have felt this very ache and a Savior who knows it, too. He has promised to come back, and when he does, you will be together with him and your true family in a home that no one can take, that no one can break. Come, Lord Jesus!
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