Whether We’re 5 or 95, We Can All Feel Homesick for Something Better

Created for Fellowship with God

Lily McKinley, the main character in the Dream Keeper Saga, often feels caught between worlds. She has a vivid imagination and a quirky personality that alienates her from her peers, and she longs to live permanently in the Somnium realm—this dream realm in the series where the sparks of her imagination in her daydreams come to life around her. At the same time that she yearns for this place, she knows that if she were to move there, she would be cut off from her family who love her so much.

And so she spends most of the series with a sense of homesickness and displacement, a yearning to finally have a place that she can call her own, where she belongs and where she fits. This sense of homesickness is one that I think we all experience, whether we’re a kid who’s five years old or ninety-five, because the truth of the matter is that we were made for a different world.

We were created to have perfect fellowship with God and to walk with him in a loving relationship. But the truth is that because we are fallen, because sin has afflicted us, we are cut off from him, and we are living our lives and laboring in a world that is a pale shadow of the perfect creation that he originally designed.

C. S. Lewis talks very often about this sense of displacement and homesickness. He referred to a French term for it: Sehnsucht. It means a longing for something that is not achievable in our world. Lewis would talk about it as that old ache or our desire to be finally, at long last, in our own far-off country. Many of us who long for creation to be redeemed can identify with that yearning to finally have that far-off country that we can call our own.

But thanks be to God. We will not be sojourners forever. God will not let us wander through this wilderness homeless and bereft of him forever. He sent his Son to redeem us to himself and to make all things new. And even while we have this hollow in our hearts as we yearn for communion with him, he sent his Son, who will then return and bring in the new heavens and the new earth. He will wipe away every tear from every eye. And there will be no pain anymore and no mourning, for all the former things will have passed away. And in that realm, we will dwell with the Lord forever. And finally, at long last, we will be home.

Kathryn Butler is the author of the Dream Keeper Saga.

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