Homesick
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
written by Rev. Erik Khoobyarian
When I was a young child I would get terribly homesick. As early as I can remember, I had a very hard time being away. What's so strange to me as I look back is that I often felt homesick when I should have been happy and distracted by the fun things happening. I would be at a friend's house, but all I wanted to do was go home. I looked forward to going to camp all year, and yet as soon as the sun went down on the first night, I had the gnawing in my stomach that just wouldn't go away. Each summer I would spend a few weeks with my grandmother, but the first few nights I was plagued with the desire to be home.
Often, my parents cracked under the pressure and picked me up. If I'm being completely honest, I'm not sure what exactly it was that I needed to get back to - what I was longing for. But what I can say without reservation is that very deep within me was a need to be where I knew I belonged.
My own experiences of homesickness have been a strange gift as I’ve tried to understand God. Sometimes I think we need to lean into our experiences to understand otherwise confusing or complex theological issues. Jesus often spoke about the Kingdom of God in the gospel accounts of his teachings. This idea of the Kingdom of God is sometimes hard to visualize or understand and even harder to communicate to someone else. Just this week I was talking with someone who said “people have really made religion confusing” and I agree! And while I do think it can get a bit convoluted, there’s some good reason as we’re all trying to put words to the indescribable nature of God. It is a little bit like trying to describe the color yellow or the smell of a rose.
Contemporary theologian Frederick Buechner describes the Kingdom of God like this:
"If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we would know that the Kingdom of God in the sense of holiness, goodness, beauty is as close as breathing and is crying out to be born both within ourselves and within the world; we would know that the Kingdom of God is what we all of us hunger for above all other things even when we don't know its name or realize that it's what we're starving to death for. The Kingdom of God is where our best dreams come from and our truest prayers. We glimpse it at those moments when we find ourselves being better than we are and wiser than we know. We catch sight of it when at some moment of crisis a strength seems to come to us that is greater than our own strength. The Kingdom of God is where we belong. It is home, and whether we realize it or not, I think we are all of us homesick for it."
I have to confess that I sometimes get that homesick feeling now. It isn't a longing to be back in my childhood home, but it is a longing to be somewhere where the pains of this world aren't all around us and where God's love is experienced and shared. A longing to be home. The beauty of our calling as Christians is that God desires that we would experience that feeling of home now and that we are able to experience it in our lives.
So, again, I’m grateful for my feelings of homesickness as they help me to lean into my own understanding of the Kingdom of God. This is particularly necessary in a modern society where people are searching in many dangerous and fruitless ways for what we can truly only find in God – in the Kingdom of God. This is why Jesus spoke so much about it and why whenever we pray the Lord’s Prayer we pray that God’s kingdom would come.
Are there times when you can reflect back on having experienced the Kingdom of God based on Frederick Buechner's description? What are some ways that you can make adjustments in your life to allow yourself to be more open to ushering in God's kingdom? Choose one thing you can do this week, and pray that God would give you the guidance you need as you seek to say "your kingdom come."