Homesick for a Home I've Never Seen

I have been watching the AMC show, Mad Men, going through the series on Netflix. Last week, one of the women characters tells the main guy, Don Draper, "Utopia means, 'the good place.' It also means, 'the place that cannot be'."

I thought that was sad, but so true.

I was listening to NPR on the way home from work today. It's the main way I get news these days. I have been notoriously bad throughout my life at keeping up with current events, but NPR keeps my attention, I guess because it goes in-depth on each topic, and is interview-based. I like interviews.

The story I heard when I was about 5 minutes from home was an interview with someone who lives near my hometown. And I started to cry. I was wondering at myself because I wasn't crying at the appropriate times, you know, when people were talking about the tragedy the story was focused on or how it was affecting them personally.

I stepped back like a third party observer, watching myself crying there in the car, and asked, "What is it you're crying about?" I answered myself, sort of sheepishly, "Home."

For a girl who has traveled as much as I have, and lived in a couple of foreign countries, home is a somewhat confusing concept.

I have been getting irritated for no obvious reason lately, and it happened again at lunch the other day. People were talking and I just wanted to leave and stare at a blank wall and make a sound like a radiator--one constant, mindless tone--and just check out for awhile.

I started talking to myself again.

"Elizabeth, what are you so irritated about?"
"I think I might be going through culture shock again, or maybe reverse culture shock this time."
"Ahh...yes. Well, we've been through this before, so cheer up! Go google it and get a sense of perspective."

So I did. I went to my desk and googled "culture shock" and read through the stages again, realizing that I was entering the second, hard stage of culture shock almost as on schedule as if I had marked it on a calendar the day we moved here.

Tulsa's a little bit different from New York City. And I am feeling like an outsider, although I was born just one state over. The thing is, I'm not the same Elizabeth I was when I left this part of the country, and I don't quite recognize my own neighbors anymore.

When I get this lonely I find myself dug down to the level of a certain longing that I know God put there in my heart. My high school youth leader put it this way: "Earth is not my home!"

Look up the word, "sehnsucht" on wikipedia.org, and you'll find a lot of amazing thoughts on what I am getting at.


Hebrews 11 is a chapter in the Bible that talks about people who lived with a faith in God that led them to live in profound ways that seemed like failure to most people. I LOVE that chapter. Here's a piece of it:

"And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them."
-Hebrews 11:13b-16, the Bible

I know what it feels like to be a foreigner. I remember culture shock hitting me in my college semester in Italy when I realized that I didn't even know how to mail a letter.

There is an ache to culture shock and to homesickness, and I don't know how to describe this deep aching properly. But I don't think I have to, because I have a hunch you feel it, too, whether or not you have ever left the place of your birth.

God set eternity in our hearts, and made us for a world that is perfect and restored and HIS, fully. And if you are a follower of Jesus, you will never find full satisfaction until that kind of home comes to earth.



You and I are homesick for a home we've never seen.