Homesickness is a funny kind of illness. It sort of hurts all over. In your throat when someone asks the wrong question at the wrong time. In your lungs when a reminder of what you’ve lost takes your breath away. In your core when there’s the gut-punch of knowing what you long for may never come to pass. There’s a desperation to it, when hope and grief intertwine into an ache.
Someday, we know, someday, as our seasonal songs tell us: “The blind will see, the deaf will hear, the dead will live again.” Another tells us, “Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother! And in his name all oppression shall cease!”
Luke 21:25-36 tells us to be on guard, for your redemption is drawing near. But we wait, we long for the time when all shall be made right, when there will be no more tears or death, no more oppression, or haves and have-nots, no more pandemics or natural disasters or injustice… when the upside-down Kingdom of God comes on earth as it is in heaven.
We wait. We hope. We long, with the deep groaning of the Spirit within us when words fail. It hurts, God. Life hurts so much.
Sometimes what hurts is that we know we don’t belong here, not forever. We were made for the Garden, for full communion with God, but here on earth? It’s easy to wonder if God is real at all. And if he is, what are we doing down here? Sometimes we look around and we see so much wrong with the world and feel so disconnected from the people in it, we might feel like we’re almost aliens, that we don’t belong here.
I know what it feels like to be deeply rooted in a place that just doesn’t feel like home. I know what it is like to be new in town, to not know a single soul in my city, over and over as I have moved across the country. I know what it’s like to be Too Much or Not Enough, to feel like an outsider. As a queer woman, I know what it’s like to wonder if I’m the only one or if there is someone out there like me, to be different in a room where everyone else fits in, to have people disagree with unchangeable parts of my identity. To be told I don’t belong and never will.
Those places don’t feel like home. Those places can make the world not feel like home.
These old places promise they will feel like home if only we change who we are, if only we turn away from God’s call on our lives to be more palatable, to be their definition of successful or holy or perfect. Drunk on our own power and consumed with the worries of this life.
It is a lie. The harder we try to be something we’re not, the more the ache grows.
And yet! And yet, we’re not idle in our waiting for the coming of our Lord. Our homesickness doesn’t freeze us into inaction. We move forward, serving and befriending, loving and being loved. Creating a makeshift home for the homesick.
We stand as greeters at the exits from those aching places, instead ushering all who long for true belonging out into the wilderness, outside the strict boxes for what constitutes “fitting in.” If you are done contorting yourself to fit in, if your homesickness is eating at you, longing for a better world, come. Come to the tables in the wilderness and join the preparations for the feast of anticipation.
And so we wait, homesick for a place we have always known but never been, filled with the ache of longing, but lonely no longer in the communion of saints before us and with us and to come. We are not alone in our waiting.
Our hearts may break as we look to the empty skies, and we cry “How long, Oh Lord?” but our homesickness, our grief intertwined with hope for a coming day, doesn’t keep us from calling out to our fellow misfit neighbors to wait with us in the wild places, the places we can belong as our true selves, in a hint of the freedom and glory that is to come. We are called into belovedness, into Kingdom-belonging. Take a stand and raise your heads! Our redemption, our King, is drawing near.
Jenna DeWitt
Jenna DeWitt (she/her) is an aromantic asexual Methodist. She lives in sunny Southern California. Jenna earned a bachelor of arts in news-editorial journalism from Baylor University and has over a decade of experience working on Christian magazines.
Yet Alive 