The longing for home

Well I’ll be. So I was reading some more of The Prodigal God by Tim Keller last night in a section called “Our Longing for Home” and as I am reading I am thinking, I know what this is. And sure enough, I turn the page and there is the word, Sehnsucht, and the quote from Lewis’s The Weight of Glory. Keller writes this:

Home, then, is a powerful but elusive concept. The strong feelings that surround it reveal some deep longing within us for a place that absolutely fits and suits us, where we can be, or perhaps find, our true selves. Yet it seems no real place or actual family ever satisfies these yearnings, though many situations arouse them.

He then goes on the place the parable of the prodigal son in the wider biblical narrative of exile and returning, beginning with the way we have all been spiritual exiles since being set out of the garden of Eden, and how the theme plays out over and over in biblical history.

Some people, no doubt, think “Sehnsucht, Schmehnsucht”, but as I’ve written before, I find it so freeing, because it’s basically an acknowledgment that deep within us is a longing that is never going to be satisfied outside of the Father’s presence. Otherwise it’s all to easy to peg it on whatever it is you perceive your life to be missing, but it won’t be there either.

The chapter that contains this section is actually called “Redefining Hope” and it ends with this paragraph:

Jesus will make the world our perfect home again. We will no longer be living “East of Eden,” always wandering and never arriving. We will come, and the father will meet us and embrace us, and we will be brought into the feast.

Picture from here.