I was twenty-four when we packed up the U-haul truck on a blistering hot day in July. Sweat trickled down my back as we hefted the last of the cardboard boxes into the truck. We locked the front door of the white, 1920’s bungalow we’d bought two years prior. The for-sale sign still stood in the yard. I fought tears as we bid our first home goodbye. I’d had visions of raising our kids in this small white house with its high ceilings and the guest room I’d painted a pale, buttery yellow. I stood in front of the home I loved and wondered if I’d ever dream another dream that couldn’t be crushed.
Even if we’d stayed, the pale yellow room would have remained empty. There will be no children, the doctor had said a week before the moving truck swallowed everything we owned. My future was empty now, and the loss leaked down my cheeks. Maybe the neighbors thought I was sad to move away. It was true enough. My best friends lived in our neighborhood. My parents were across town. But moving was a smokescreen, a dumpster fire, a distraction from a future I already hated.
I didn’t stop crying until I crossed the Mississippi River. The river was the halfway point between home and home, old and new. Over the next year, I crossed the river more than a dozen times, trying to hold on to all that was familiar in the place where I’d been born and raised. I was reluctant to attach myself to any other locale. Home was home, until one day it wasn’t.
I remember how it felt, that day I crossed the Mississippi when the sun was setting low in the horizon. Dipping down into the river, the sun was a pink orb smearing the sky with a palette of titian hues. It had been nearly a year since the day I crossed in my Jeep, following the U-haul closely. A year gone by, and on the bridge between my two homes, neither side felt like any place I lived. Home was a construct, a memory, an illusion. I asked myself, “Can I be content if nothing ever feels sure?” I was full of sorrow those days, fragile but hard. Keep strong so nothing leaks out. The empty pale yellow room followed me everywhere I went. I felt untethered that day on the bridge, like the barges below on the river, unmoored from anything solid.
It was an oddly familiar feeling.
I was fifteen the first time I set foot in a foreign country. Along with a dozen other teenagers and a couple of adults, the high school service trip I’d signed up for routed me through Houston then Guatemala City. By the end of the week, I’d picked up more Spanish than a year of classes had provided. I enjoyed the black beans and rice we ate at most meals, slept soundly in the tri-level bunk beds at the orphanage, grew accustomed to the painting and cleaning that filled our hours during the day. I learned to smell the air for the afternoon thunderstorm that would move through each day. Without disclosing it to the customs officer, I pressed between the pages of my Bible the petals of the purple flowers that grew over all the trees.
The following year, I returned to Guatemala for a longer trip. I was nearly fluent in Spanish by then and could converse in the market. I could read and write in the language. I returned to the US the second time with a weighted sense of confusion I couldn’t explain. When I translated the letters I received from the orphanage after my return, I couldn’t articulate the tangle of disconnection I felt from my bedroom in the house I grew up in. Belonging felt like a dream I’d once had. I remembered that feeling years later on the bridge above the barges on the Mississippi. Unmoored was the word. No acreage felt like mine. Home was a construct, a memory, an illusion.
I’m thirty-seven now, and I’ve lived in one place for nearly fourteen years. There is no pale yellow room, but there is a blue one and a green one occupied by the boys who came to me through paperwork, adoption decrees, and years of waiting. These past years, I’ve lived a small life in a small town in a small region, and sometimes I wake up in the morning with a yearning I can’t explain. Undeniably, the house we’ll pay off in twenty years is home. My name on the mortgage tells me where home is. My bed is where I want to sleep, my table where I want to share meals and write words. I love the warmth of familiarity and the way I can intuitively drive the path to my house without thinking much on it. I measure the turn of the seasons by the intertwining tulip trees in my backyard. It’s solid and familiar in the ways that satisfy most people.
But stepping outside the city limits tilts belonging on its axis, and sometimes I don’t know if I’ll ever feel settled. Every time I cross the river I wonder when home will take effect. The difference is that at thirty-seven I know why I feel this way and furthermore, I know why it isn’t wrong.
The author of Hebrews doesn’t use the word unmoored. He[1] calls it sojourning, which is a far better description because it means there is an actual home. We’re just not in it yet. He gives us monikers like exiles. Strangers. Aliens. Words that, by definition, communicate a lack of belonging in one place while still having an anchoring point in another. If a Christian doesn’t feel like he belongs in the world, it’s because he’s not supposed to. This isn’t all there is. Of those who have gone before us in faithfulness, the author of Hebrews said they “acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a better homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared them for a city.” (Heb. 11:14-16).
Home isn’t a construct, a memory, or an allusion. It’s a better country, a residence we haven’t occupied yet. The moment you repented of your sins and believed in Christ, you ceased belonging to an earth that cries out for reckoning. The kingdom has come, but it is coming still. You live here now, but home is yet to come. C.S. Lewis famously said, “If I find in myself desires nothing in this world can satisfy, then the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.[2}” I feel the tension of disconnect sometimes, and it isn’t as undesirable as I used to think. I panicked on the bridge when it first pressed against my chest. “Aren’t I supposed to be happy wherever God plants me?” But I’m older now, and I welcome it when I’m discouraged by the sufferings, sins, and birthing pangs of earthly living. Sometimes I turn to my husband and quote the poet, “The world is too much with us.[3]” He knows I mean, “I need to remember this isn’t all there is.” It’s good to let the weight of disconnection sit heavy on your chest. You were made for a better country.
When an anchoring point feels difficult to grasp, when my discontentment isn’t tied to my circumstances but to my inability to love Christ as much as I wish I did, I know that the better country is calling out to me. One day we’ll see things fully. We’ll leave all the dim seeing behind with the trappings of earthly kings and countries. These days I lean into the search for home. It isn’t that I don’t know where home is. It’s that I know I’m not there yet.
We have the notion that we should always feel settled and happy, content with everything in life. We believe that being rooted in one place means we’re safe and secure. Contentment, the kind that is pinned securely to Christ, isn’t tangled up in a white house with the porch swing and a pale yellow room. Those things can vanish in a moment, and then where would home be? True contentment rests in knowing that home is a Person, and His better country will satisfy every yearning our souls have for belonging. Christ is the fixed point in our lives of longing. He is contentment when you cannot find the address for a place that feels like home. Your heavenly home will certainly feel like a place prepared for you. The builder and architect is God Himself, and every longing will be satisfied in full by the One who created us for that better country. Until that day, we trust Him with our sojourning and liberally share the directions to the better country with all who wander with us.
True contentment rests in knowing that home is a Person, and His better country will satisfy every yearning our souls have for belonging. Share on X[1] I have no idea if the author of Hebrews was a man, so I use “he” as a generic pronoun. I hope part of the “seeing fully” in heaven means we’ll either finally know who wrote Hebrews or we won’t care.
[2] C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity.
[3] William Wordsworth. “The World is Too Much with Us”
Glenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and lives in rural Southeast Missouri where she tries and fails to keep up with her two energetic sons. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence (P&R) and Everyday Faithfulness (Crossway), and Memorizing Scripture (Moody). Connect with her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.