Longing for a Home

There’s something about sitting in an apartment filled with boxes that can either awaken excitement for a new adventure’s potential or offer a rare sort-of heaviness. Tonight marks my 7th move in 6 years, and the latter emotion is the one I’m resonating with.

I moved into this apartment 10 months ago with a lot of anxieties weighing on my mind but also, with a hope that I would be able to “get settled” here. Yet here I am, those dreams altered, as I prepare to move back to the city I lived in before.

If I feel confident about my new job and upcoming responsibilities, why do I feel this ache like I’m not supposed to leave? Every time I move, I feel this lump in my throat, like “it’s not supposed to be this way.” I desire to be settled and stop saying these goodbyes, stop packing and unpacking boxes, stop bruising my legs as I move pieces of furniture and bump into stairwell rails, stop pulling my heart away from friendships that I’ve made...

Sometimes moving feels like a break-up. Like it’s the right thing but also, am I looking for someone/something that doesn’t exist? I long for a sort-of permanence that I know doesn’t exist in this world.

During this past month, I’ve been reading several C.S. Lewis books, as well as Alistair McGrath’s biography about his life. Lewis was a British theologian, philosopher, professor, and a well-known fiction author. Lewis’s Narnia series captivated me as a child and, in recent years, I’ve read his works Till We Have Faces and the Four Loves several times.

One of Lewis’s themes is longing. His life’s longing was for joy, but his novels seem to reveal a longing for home as well. I think the two are intertwined.

Lewis used his imagination to create fantasy worlds where characters travel on journeys and eventually realize the desires that are propelling them forward are deeper and wider than simply their adventure’s resolution.

In Mere Christianity, Lewis explains that "Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise [...] 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."

As Tim Keller says, “It is only God’s kingdom that has foundations that will last. It is only God’s approval, God’s protection, and God’s eternal inheritance that are permanent.”

Though I hope this move will be my last one in a long time, I will not ignore but rather lean into this longing for a home. It is a reminder that God’s love and kingdom are permanent, and that as a believer, I can hope in a true home that is “further up and further in”.

With joy,

Annie