Homesick for a Country I Have Never Seen

I have been homesick my whole life for a place I have never been.

I want to say that plainly before I say anything else, because it took me decades to stop being ashamed of it. I have a wife I have loved since I was a teenager. I have a son. I have work I was made to do and music I get to make and a faith that holds me when nothing else will. And underneath all of it, every good thing the Lord ever handed me, there has always run a low ache that none of those things ever fully closed. Not because they failed me. They did not fail me. It is that they were never built to be the thing. They were only ever rumors of it.

For most of my life I thought that meant something was wrong with me. A man with that much to be grateful for, still aching underneath, starts to wonder if he is ungrateful, or broken, or simply impossible to satisfy. I tried to kill the ache with achievement. I tried to fill it with belonging. I tried to argue it away with theology. None of it worked, because I was treating a compass like a wound.

Then I read Hebrews eleven honestly, and it turned the whole thing over.

The chapter walks through the men and women of faith, and partway down it stops to tell you something about all of them at once. "These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth" (Hebrews 11:13). Strangers. Pilgrims. They had the same ache I have. They never found a country here that held them. And here is the part that undid me. They did not treat it as a defect. They did not spend their lives trying to medicate it. They read it as a direction. "But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city" (Hebrews 11:16).

The ache was not a flaw in them. It was a compass. And the compass had an address.

I believe that ache was set in me on purpose, by the One who made me, the same way it was set in them. The whole creation carries it. Paul says the whole creation "groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now" and that we ourselves "groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body" (Romans 8:22-23). You are not the only thing that aches. The mountains ache. The oceans ache. The whole rendering groans for a country it has not reached yet. A fish does not resent the water. A man built for a home he has not arrived at will ache until he gets there, and that ache is mercy, because it is the thing that keeps him walking instead of settling for a roadside motel and calling it home.

Now let me tell you what kind of country it is, because this is where I part ways with the picture most people carry.

Most folks, when they say heaven, picture a thinning. Clouds. Harps. Disembodied spirits drifting in a fog, getting less and less solid until they dissolve into God like sugar in coffee. That is not the country the Bible promises. That is Plato in a choir robe, and the church has been singing it for centuries without checking it against the text. The country Scripture actually promises is more solid than this world, not less. Abraham "looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God" (Hebrews 11:10). Foundations. A city has streets and gates and walls and weight. John saw "a new heaven and a new earth" and "the tabernacle of God" come down to be with men, where "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes" (Revelation 21:1-4). A new earth. A body raised. The redemption of the body, Paul said, not redemption from it.

And I do not believe that on a hunch. I believe it because it already happened once. When Christ came out of the tomb, He did not come out as a ghost or a glow. He came out with a body you could touch. He ate fish on the shore in front of His friends. He kept the wounds in His hands. He was more solid on Easter morning than He had been on Good Friday, not less. Paul calls Him "the firstfruits of them that slept" (1 Corinthians 15:20), the first sheaf of a harvest still coming in, the down payment on the whole new creation. And he says Christ "shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body" (Philippians 3:21). So the better country is not wishful architecture. It is guaranteed by an empty tomb and patterned on a risen body that still has scars. The country will be exactly as real as He was when He walked back out of death, because He is its first citizen, and we are fashioned after Him.

The God who made dirt and called it good is not ashamed of dirt. He is not drawing up plans to evaporate you out of the physical world He built. He is going to hand you the physical world at full resolution, with the curse pulled out of it like a splinter, and your own body raised more real than it has ever been. The better country is not less than this one. It is this one healed. That is why the homesickness is so specific, so embodied, so much like missing a real place. Because it is a real place. The longing fits the country because the same God authored both the longing and the home.

And here is the tenderest line in the whole passage, the one the camps almost never preach. God is not ashamed to be called their God. Look at who these people were. Strangers. Pilgrims. Men with no country and no standing, the ones the world would not keep. And the God of the entire universe is not ashamed to stitch His own name onto them and call Himself their God in front of everyone.

I know something about managing what people are allowed to see. I have done it my whole life, holding up a kind of glass between myself and the world, letting the right amount through and no more, keeping the rest of me back where it could not be used against me. The better country is the place where that glass comes all the way down. Where you are fully known, every last corner of you, and you are not ashamed, and no one uses it against you. That is not a new idea. It is the oldest one. In the garden, before any of this went wrong, the man and his wife were "naked, and were not ashamed" (Genesis 2:25). The country is the garden given back. The hiding is over. The curator is retired for good. And the only reason there is no shame left in that country is that Christ already bore it on the tree, "who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame" (Hebrews 12:2). He carried the shame out of the country so that not one ounce of it would be waiting there for you.

I am closer to that country now than I have ever been. I have stood near its border with people I love as they walked up to the gate, and I have watched what the hope does to a dying face. The hope is not a wish I am working up the nerve to believe. It is the surest thing I own, because the One who built the country cannot lie, and He has already gone ahead to get the place ready. "In my Father's house are many mansions," He said. "I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also"(John 14:2-3).

That last line is the whole thing. That where I am, there ye may be also. The country turns out to be a place and a Person at the same time. The address is a face. All the ache I spent years being ashamed of was never really for a location. It was for Him, and the country is just where He is, finally and forever, with the glass down and the shame gone and the body raised.

So if you carry that ache too, the one no marriage ever closed and no success ever filled and no camp on earth ever satisfied, stop trying to kill it, and stop being ashamed of it. It is not your defect. It is your compass. It was set in you by the God who built the country and is not ashamed to be called your God. The day is coming when the pilgrim lays the long road down, and the gate swings open, and the One who went ahead to prepare the place is standing right there in it.

I have never seen the country. But I have seen His face by faith, and that has turned out to be enough to walk on.

I am almost home.

Grace and Peace,
Brandan