By Grace Davis, May 13, 2023.
If I am being entirely and wholly honest with all of you, I am in a season of sorrow, loneliness, and discomfort. To put it plainly, I am homesick. Every day I awake with an empty soul, just eager to get one word in with my family or a text from a dear friend. I go about my day, being the working gal that I am this summer, only to find my eyes welling with tears as I listen to my favorite Judah and The Lion song in the car while it repeats, “Will I be left alone? If I don't let go, I'm fighting my own. Lost fight, grip tight on a heavy rope that wasn't mine to hold.”
I could go on about the lyrics of my favorite band, but for time’s sake, I won’t.
What is so extremely striking to me is that this is not who I am. I am the crazy girl who thought she wanted to run off to Hawaii after graduation to attend the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And don’t laugh when I tell you I bought a black and green lanyard with the university’s logo streaming along the sides to attach to my backpack during my Sophomore year of high school. Senior year, I even seriously considered going to a school in West Palm Beach. Seriously. I am not a “homesick person.” That can’t be me.
Right?
Here is the truth. Right now, I am living in a house with seven wonderful girls, committing my mornings to quiet time, eating healthy, and watching a lot of TV. I don’t see the issue. I wanted this, and I worked for this, yet I feel so empty and far from what was comfortable.
It was not until I read a liturgy from my favorite book of all time, “Every Moment Holy,” that I realized this feeling is only but a gift from my Heavenly Father, who does, in fact, care, see, and love me. I think this sudden feeling of homesickness, this emptiness of my soul, and this sadness that seems so close to depression is but a gentle reminder of the foreign land that Earth is. The truth is that home is a fleeting reality. Things are always shifting, changing, and evolving. Friends move away, a hometown feels unfamiliar, and a childhood is lost. We are meant to grow up, but I don’t like that. Lately, I have been thinking about the summers when I would spend almost every day by the pool, eating snow cones and munching on the cold Little Ceasers pizza that my mom would order for me and my friends to share because it was only $5. It is hard to let go of when life was easy, and everything was handed to you.
So let this time of growth, this time of change, be a beautiful reminder of the everlasting home that our Father promises us.
A friend of mine reminded me recently that even if my summer looked much different, maybe better, or if I was home, I would still be sick for something else. I would still be discontent and point out almost every flaw in the place where I was planted. How convicting is that? During one of my forced and dreaded quiet times this past week, I landed on Psalm 31. Verses 7-8 have been with me ever since. It reads, “I will be glad and rejoice in your love, for you saw my affliction and knew the anguish of my soul. You have not given me into the hands of the enemy but have set my feet in a spacious place.” This is a lament Psalm written by David as he comes to the feet of the Lord, knowing it is the place where he can find true freedom and promised protection. I know David was not a perfect person, but he did run to the Father, heart open and palms lifted towards Heaven. David knew that God had shown his faithfulness in the past and would continue to give him exactly what he needed when he needed it.
This is what I want the posture of my heart to be as I mourn. I can be sad. It’s okay for me to cry, even though if you know me, you know I cry maybe once a month.
This is a hard season, but it also evidently points me to the truth that eternity has been planted into my heart. 1 Chronicles 29:15 says, “For we are aliens and temporary residents in your presence as were all our ancestors. Our days on earth are like a shadow, without hope.”
So blunt, yet so completely and utterly true. And so I will leave you with this, a passage from a liturgy that has left me sobbing each time I read it.
I quote:
“Hardly we had ventured from our yards when we felt ourselves so strangely far from something - and somewhere that we despaired of ever reaching - that we turned to hide the welling of our eyes. We knew it, even then, as the opening of a wound this world cannot repair- the first birthing of that weight every soul must wake up to alone
because it is the burden of that wild and lonely space that only God in his eternity can fill.
And as we wait, this sacred, homesick sorrow works in us to cultivate a faith that knows one day, he will. That is the holy work of homesickness:
To teach our hearts how lonely they have always been
For God.”
-Inconsolable Homesickness, Every Moment Holy
