If you’re feeling adrift and find yourself searching for more, you may be homesick for a place called Heaven.
Homesickness is something that we all can relate to, especially living in world full of fear, trials and loneliness.
“That longing that we feel within us, that desire for that place where things are as they ought to be – that’s really homesickness.”
Elyse Fitzpatrick describes feelings of homesickness from a parental perspective after sending a child away from home for an extended period of time.
“You send your little 6th grader off to camp; you send little things along with her to try to help her as she goes through her week without her home. That thing that she’s feeling within her, that pain, that desire, is something that really is a homesickness within all of us. It is a longing for that place we were meant to be.”
The place we were meant to be is certainly unlike anything we have ever experienced before. Elyse describes the essence of what is missing as it relates to our experience here on earth.
“I am not waking up in the morning and saying, ‘Oh I wish everything was different.’ Even if we’re in the nicest home that could possibly be imagined, we all still know that something’s missing, and what’s missing is home.”
We need be careful about how we are building our theology about Heaven and the new earth. She suggests we build our beliefs on the testimony of Scripture, over every other source.
“We need to build our expectations, our excitement, our hope, our anticipations of the words of people who, in John the Revelator’s experience, have actually seen it. Build it really with the only testimony of that really can stand the test of time, and that would be the testimony of Scripture.”
Embracing homesickness doesn’t mean that we’re discontent with our time here on earth, it means we recognize that our stay here is temporary, but our eternal home is in Heaven.
“Instead of saying, ‘We shouldn’t feel that because to feel that means that we’re discontented.’ Oh no actually, especially if you read in Hebrews 11, all of those people were longing for that city whose builder and maker was God.”
Elyse Fitzpatrick is a retreat and conference speaker, bestselling author and Director of Women Helping Women Ministries.
