Growing up, I always thought I would end up living in my hometown for the rest of my life. I’m a homebody at heart, and I crave the feeling of belonging in a community and making a home where my family feels anchored and stable. I wanted to live in a place where I felt understood, loved, and valued by friends and family who know me well and in a culture I understood well. But God has sovereignly carried me in a different direction, many different directions actually. Since getting married eight years ago, my husband and I have lived in eight different homes in five different cities. Even now, as I’m reading through today’s passage, we currently live in a different country, still learning a new language and culture that is very different from my hometown.
With each move, I’ve experienced the anxiety and loneliness that comes with feeling far from home. To be honest, especially during the first couple of moves, I struggled with selfishness as I questioned why God would bring me to places that felt so very far from where I longed to be. Many of my first few months, and sometimes years, in a new place were filled with tearful prayers as I called out to God. Most of those prayers were requests that God would bring me what I thought I needed in order to feel like I belonged, be it better community, friends, or even a job closer to my hometown. Blinded by my own feelings of homesickness, rarely were my prayers for the cities and new people God had placed me in community with, which is why the Lord’s call for prayer immediately captured my attention in today’s passage.
My own experience being far from home is just a fraction of the upheaval the exiles must have felt in Babylon. I can only imagine the hope they felt when God met their questioning with a promise. The exiles, strangers in a nation that knew nothing of the True God, were given a promise of a return to their home 70 years in the future. However, God still called for faithful, holy living in the present as they waited for the promised good He had in store for them. This hopeful promise of good to come is what motivated faithful living in their new home. They were to desire good for those around them as God desired good for them. And during this season of prayerfully lifting up their new city, they could trust God with their future because they’d seen Him keep His promises in the past.
The promise given in today’s passage was specifically for the exiles, but it shows us God’s loving character. Through Jesus’ own teaching, we see that we, too, are called to faithful living where God has placed us in the middle of a lost world. The longing that the exiles felt to return home and the earthly homesickness we sometimes feel are simply reflections of the “otherness” we might feel as Christians in a world that is seeking to drown out the glory of the True God at every turn. This heavenly homesickness reminds us we are not of this world, but citizens of God’s kingdom and are called to live as such (Philippians 3:20).
Whether we live down the street from our childhood house, across the globe, experience earthly homesickness, or love the adventure of moving to a new city, Christians are all living far from our heavenly home. We know what it feels like to try and follow Jesus in a worldly culture that would love to pull us away from Christ. We experience the hurt, tears, and pain that come with living in a broken world, and we feel the deep-seated truth that this isn’t where we belong. But we are also given a promise – the promise of a living hope in Jesus Christ. It is our motivation for faithful, holy living in each of the cities we find ourselves in.
We too are exiles, living in a strange land, waiting for the fulfillment of our salvation. And as we wait, we are called to love as our Living Hope loved, to love as Jesus loved both His friends and His enemies. Jesus taught us to love our neighbors (Matthew 22:39) but also to love and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44).
I wish I had spent more of those early years praying for the good of my community and for wisdom to know how to love everyone well and live in a way that reflects His glory to a lost world. I regret not praying that every new person I was meeting would come to know Jesus Christ as their living hope.
The realization that we don’t belong here shouldn’t lead us to despair or hatred or fear of the lost world around us but rather to a joyful expectation for the fulfillment of God’s promise to bring us home to His kingdom. And as such, we are to continually pray for our neighbors, cities, friends, and family to find their home in Christ.
I don’t know where God will take my family next, but with each bout of earthly homesickness I feel, it reminds me of heavenly homesickness, and that heavenly homesickness is good. When it feels hard to live in a world so opposed to God and His goodness, let us drop to our knees and pray that God would bring about good for our cities through the spreading of His kingdom and that others might also experience the joy of heavenly homesickness.
