There’s this saying that’s been rolling around in my head ever since Brittany, our chaplain for international students, used it in worship on Sunday. She prayed, “God, you are the homesickness we can never shake off.” It was the kind of phrase that makes my whole body pause for a moment and listen because it’s so unfamiliar and strangely beautiful.
In my life, homesickness is not necessarily something I seek out. It’s a gut wrenching feeling of loss and separation, a gaping hole deep in my chest that slowly fades to a dull throb but doesn’t feel like it will ever truly disappear. As an eight year old at church camp, it was the thing that left me sobbing into my pillow when everyone else was asleep and a few years later, at soccer camp, it was the thing that lurked in the silence and inactivity of free time, the thing that turned seconds into interminable hours and Tuesdays into a marathon of wishing it could be Friday already. Even later, at music camp, its specter loomed on the first day amidst bare walls and unfamiliar faces and as I approached my freshman year of college, it became the cliché that I was determined to conquer and transcend. Above all else, it was a sickness—something undesirable and toxic.
So why do Brittany’s words ring with truth? How could I agree so fully with a statement that put God on par with sickness, a statement that associated God with loneliness, sadness, pain, and despair?
Then at the beginning of the week, as I looked at the shrinking gaps in my schedule, I began to understand. Homesickness has always dwelt in my open spaces, the times when I’m untethered and drifting with nothing to do, the times when I’m lying awake at night or sitting in a silent dormitory or walking by myself. But when I wake up to the chatter of friends or return to the soccer field or lock myself in a practice room, the feelings fade away. They still lurk in the periphery, but I can keep them at bay for a little while, burying them beneath a flurry of activity.
The problem is, when I fill every hole in my day in order to keep out homesickness, I am also keeping out any meaning my life might have; I am also keeping out God. Because God, too, dwells in my open spaces, spilling in through the cracks in my life and breaking me open. But when I fill every crack, it becomes easier and easier to slip away from God, to close myself off, to live a life wholly focused on me.
And yet, God is the homesickness that we can never shake off. No matter how hard I try, no matter how busy I am, no matter how many cracks I fill, God will always find a way in. God is the homesickness I can’t ignore or bury or overcome; God is the one that cuts through everything—through my schedule, my preoccupations, my distractions, my fears, and my walls, the one who sees everything I am, right down to the core, and chooses to love me anyway.
God is not the homesickness that cripples me, that leaves me crumpled and gasping and alone. No. God is the homesickness that tethers me to a place—that unsettling feeling that reminds me that I am loved, that I belong, and that there’s nothing I can do about it.
God is the homesickness I can never shake off.