bound for home

So tonight is our last full day in Taiwan after three weeks here. It's been so much fun traveling around this country and learning more about Taiwan and just spending time with family. At the same time, I've felt pretty homesick, especially this last week. My parents and my brother are here, but I've missed my home and the comfort of living there and even small things like having clean bathrooms everywhere and Internet access all the time and sleeping on a bed every night.

But I think what I've really been missing is something more. I've been reading Tim Keller's Prodigal God and learning a lot about God, myself, what I believe, and what I have not fully come to believe yet. The book basically takes the parable of the lost son (Luke 15) and uses it to basically tell the gospel and point out really insightful and crazy things about God, what it means to be lost, what our hope is, etc.

One of the sections is called "Our Longing for Home" and it talks about Jesus' parable and how the younger son wanders off and begins to long for home. Tim Keller calls home "a powerful but elusive concept"...basically that we have strong memories and attachment to what we call home but at the same time we are often disappointed when our memories don't line up with reality.

The book says that "the strong feelings that surround [home] 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". And that's a feeling I can really relate to. In Taiwan, I'm homesick and I long for somewhere that I really belong that I really feel comfortable in. But even in America, being in college has kind of messed up my sense of belonging. Even though I spend most of my year in Michigan and I love my school and the people there, my home in New Jersey still feels like my real home...where my house and parents are, where I grew up, where I fit in the best. And yet this year I've begun to feel more alienated from home...just living away for two years now, old friends not always around when I'm home, and of course being away from James. There's a kind of uneasy tension of really never feeling like I'm at home...there's always something that's missing wherever I am. And that is something that oftentimes makes me feel incredibly lost.

And the thing is I think that's normal. Keller talks about how we all have a sense of being like the younger brother in the parable who longs for home, that we may feel like we are exiles always traveling, but never really arriving. That our longing for home is a deep reflection of where our souls are at. Using examples from Adam and Eve's exile from the garden of Eden to the Israelites' exile from their own nation, Keller writes that "the message of the Bible is that the human race is a band of exiles trying to come home".

And the message of the gospel is this: that though our world is broken and the return home is difficult,  Jesus came down and experienced the exile that we feel...coming in weakness, removed from the Father, so that he could bring us Home. And writing this and hearing this again seems really lofty and unreal, but I really believe that there is a reason we long for a place of deep belonging. There is a reason we are unsatisfied with what we feel or have now. (How can we long for something we do not know of?) We were created for an ultimate home and we try to feel at home but we are never satisfied until we realize we are as lost as the younger son in the parable and realize the profound grace and really amazing love of God as Jesus came to bring us home.

I hope that made some sense. If not (or if it did), I really recommend you to read the book for yourself. It talks about a bunch of other stuff too and just really points to God the whole way which isn't always true of every Christian book.

Time to walk around Taipei for the last time in awhile. Thanks for reading and I can't wait to go home :)