Longing for Home
January 4, 2023 | Sue Pyke
(Lyric excerpts are from “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus”)
Came to earth to taste our sadness, he whose glories knew no end.
It’s January and the church can still be singing Christmas songs. In this small act of resistance, we affirm the true meaning of Jesus coming into the world. This baby, the Son of God, established his eternal kingdom of love right here where we live our everyday lives amid clock and calendar.
A new calendar year marking a fresh beginning is a worthy milestone to celebrate. But for the church, January isn’t the beginning. This season is a time of continuation and heightened expectation. The birth of Jesus builds suspense for the developing plotline of the biblical story of salvation and renewal. We who have recently celebrated the arrival of Jesus in the world now journey with him to the cross and resurrection, and we wait in hope for his return.
Dear desire of every nation, joy of every longing heart.
The psalmist cries out, Return, O Lord! How long? (90). There’s a measure of sadness and longing in our waiting. We can love the life he gives us in his beautiful world while also desiring his kingdom to come and longing for our true home with him.
My home in this world is the forests of the mountain West. I lived a forested childhood. The places I lived in my first sixteen years were populated by more trees than people. Forests of pine, fir, and spruce stretched across my neighborhood mountain ranges in northern and central Idaho and western Montana. These trees, with their faithful and timeless wisdom, were a life-giving and life-affirming presence while I was growing and changing.
Today I live in Southern California, and the trees in my neighborhood are palm, orange, and pepper berry. Which is to say, I know something of not being at home in the world. Of carrying home as longing.
C.S. Lewis wrote, These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
Our deepest longing is for home in a far country that we only catch glimpses of in the desires and longings of our present life. Singing Christmas songs in January is one way of remembering our true home as followers of Jesus in the world. His kingdom of love is both our journey and our destination, as he forms us day by day in this new year for loving him and loving one another.