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An accident occurs. A disease strikes. A birth has complications.
Fear grips us.
A trip gets prolonged. A deployment is ordered. A return is delayed.
Anxiety takes hold.
And then, those sweet words, sometimes sweeter than we can bear: “She’s going home.” “They’re on their way.” “They’re sending him home.” The distress has built like water behind a dam, and at the first sight of that absent loved one, the relief bursts through.
I love to watch reunion videos, especially of soldiers returning after deployments. Upon seeing these people again after they’ve been gone, often in danger, their loved ones can’t seem to hug them hard enough. Children come running, and wives collapse in grateful tears.
Likewise, nearly all of us have had a loved one experience a long hospital stay. We are, of course, grateful for hospitals and the healing they bring. But we don’t want to be there forever, and we don’t want our friends and family there forever. We want them home.
When our loved ones are gone, something is not right. When they come home, even if there are still hard circumstances to navigate, something is right again. Home is just where they should be.
Home is not just a place, though it often encompasses a physical location—not just a house but the streets where we grew up and places where memories were made. But it is more than that. It is familiarity; it is comfort; it is safety.
Home is a yearning—for a time, a moment, a feeling—perhaps for something that never was or cannot be again. As time passes and places change, the home we long for may exist only in memory.
That yearning is heightened by life in this fallen world, where sickness, disease, and death stalk us like a shadow. We are east of Eden, having been cast out of paradise, and now walk the earth as “sojourners and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11). We are not at home in this world. More than that, there is a strangeness to the world. Creation fell also in Adam and Eve’s transgression, and it resists us at nearly every turn, groaning until its redemption (Gen. 3:19; Rom. 8:19–22).
Home as a concept—and the ideas of being away from home and coming home—pervades Scripture. God gives the lonely a home, and the barren woman as well (Pss. 68:6; 113:9). The Prodigal Son returns home in repentance of his profligate living, and his father welcomes him in joy and celebration (Luke 15:11–32). Jesus promised that He and the Father will make Their home in believers (John 14:23).
As a boy, C.S. Lewis had a fascination with a concept that he called “Northernness,” a sense of huge skies, remoteness, severity, and cold. It was fleeting, intoxicating, and invigorating, but also familiar. It was a reminder of something that came before, or perhaps something only glimpsed from afar. It was a kind of elusive desire that soon vanishes like a breath in winter and leaves behind the ache to experience it again.
We, too, get glimpses of this place. We find it at home, with our loved ones, when things are set right, if only for a moment. We find it as well when we can rest in the presence of our God in worship, for there we anticipate what awaits us in the world to come, our heavenly home, where God dwells with us and where there will be no “mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:3–4).
Home is a wonderful place, but even it fails us sometimes. Its comforts are often fleeting, or they fall short of our hopes. Not everyone carries warm memories of home—displacement, loss, neglect, conflict, abuse, and suffering are real and can make it hard for some to relate to the concept of home.
Earthly home was never meant to satisfy completely; indeed, it cannot. Even our ability to recognize when it falls short indicates that something lies behind it. Lewis wrote:
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. . . . I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find until after death.
Jesus told His disciples about this place when He comforted them:
“In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” (John 14:2–3)
Jesus’ promise tells us that something awaits us as God’s people, something of which our earthly homes, as comforting as they may be, are only a taste, a foreshadowing. It is not for nothing that we often speak of the death of believers by saying, “He went home to be with the Lord.”
The author of Hebrews speaks of the unfulfilled longing that the heroes of faith experienced as “strangers and exiles on the earth” (Heb. 11:13). “As it is,” he writes, “they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (v. 16). There, the relief floods in, and the anxiety dissipates. May we keep our eyes fixed on this place until we gather with our fellow saints in blessed rest, with everything set right—home at last.