Homeward Longing

Have you ever missed a place you’ve never been?

Do you know that striking feeling? C.S. Lewis used the German word Sehnsucht to describe the idea in Surprised by Joy.

Rebecca K. Reynolds describes its elusive quality in Courage, Dear Heart: Letters to a Weary World. She says:

Sehnsucht is a feeling that you are missing something you love dearly but cannot quite explain to anyone, not even fully to yourself. It is a yearning for an ideal that floats always in the peripheral vision of your soul, but it disappears every time you turn and try to look at it. Sehnsucht is puttering through vulgar, mundane struggles, missing a home you cannot quite reach, and at the same time longing for a far-off land you have never seen. It is wanting to be in a place you cannot name, though whatever “it” is feels familiar. It is wishing to talk to someone dear to you but not knowing who that is. It is desire, but what is desired can’t quite be defined.

Years ago, I found that the more I looked into this yearning, the more the Word of God acknowledged it was directing me to a destination.

The marginalia in my Bible grew as I noted that it refers to its people of faith as “strangers and exiles on the earth” (Heb. 11:13). It exhorts the body of Christ to live different lives because its members are “refugees from this dying world” (Heb. 6:18 PHILLIPS) and “strangers and ‘temporary residents’” (1 Pet. 2:11 PHILLIPS) here. And it does not scorn to call such displaced people its own; of the countless men and women who lived and died looking toward a distant homeland, the writer of Hebrews wrote, “God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city” (11:16).

If these words were true, could the yearning I felt be the result of my separation from a world that was yet to be, a world to which I already belonged?

From the moment we accept Christ’s salvation and lordship, we begin to breathe the reality of a new life. We may begin to recognize foretastes of our future state -- a hope that can make room for grief and lament, a new perspective of the people around us, and a growing sense of the fullness of life that our God has promised us – that bear the same tell-tale, piercing quality of Sehnsucht.

In this devotion, we’ll look at what it means to “live Homeward” and, in the process, discover how our deep longing for Home and the King at its center can change the way we live in community, suffering, and the boundaries of our lives.