Introduction: You Can’t Go Home Again
This weekend, my wife and I returned to Colorado Springs to visit our son and his wife.
In many ways, you could say we were going home.
We lived here for more than 30 years.
That’s longer than either of us has lived anywhere else.
We raised our children here.
We built careers here.
We made friends here.
We celebrated birthdays and holidays here.
We watched our children grow from little kids into adults.
So as we drove back into town, you might expect that I would have been overwhelmed by nostalgia.
I wasn’t.
Don’t misunderstand me. I have wonderful memories of our years here, and I’m grateful for them.
But coming back didn’t feel like coming home.
And that surprised me a little.
There’s an old saying:
You can’t go home again.
The phrase comes from the title of a novel by Thomas Wolfe, and the older I get, the more I understand what it means.
Because perhaps what we really want to return to isn’t a place at all.
It’s a time.
And we can’t go back there.
The Place Is Still Here. The Time Isn’t.
Colorado Springs is still here.
Many of the streets are the same.
Some of the restaurants and stores are the same.
The mountains still rise dramatically to the west, providing one of the most beautiful backdrops of any city I’ve ever seen.
But the Colorado Springs where we raised our family exists now mostly in our memories.
Our children aren’t little anymore.
They don’t need rides to school.
There are no practices to get them to.
No homework to supervise.
No Christmas mornings with three excited little children bounding out of bed to see what Santa left behind.
And that’s okay.
Those were wonderful years.
But they belonged to a particular season.
Perhaps that’s one of the strange things about nostalgia.
We think we’re longing for a place.
But often we’re longing for the people we were—and the people we loved—at a particular moment in time.
You can return to the place.
You can’t return to the moment.
A Longing We Can’t Quite Satisfy
That realization reminded me of something C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
—C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book III, Chapter 10, “Hope”
I’ve always loved that thought.
Lewis wasn’t suggesting that the beautiful things of this world don’t matter.
Quite the opposite.
They matter tremendously.
But perhaps part of their purpose is to awaken in us a longing they can never completely satisfy.
We experience something beautiful…
and we want it to last.
A perfect family gathering.
A spectacular sunset.
A child’s laughter.
A Christmas morning.
A wonderful vacation.
A quiet evening with someone we love.
For a moment, something deep inside us says:
This.
This is what I’ve been looking for.
But then the moment passes.
The children grow up.
The vacation ends.
The sun disappears below the horizon.
People we love move away.
Some eventually leave this life altogether.
And we find ourselves longing for something we can’t quite recover.
What if that longing is telling us something?
Longing for a Better Country
The writer of Hebrews describes men and women of faith who understood that they didn’t quite belong here.
Speaking of Abraham and others who trusted God, he writes that they:
…admitted that they were foreigners and strangers on earth.
Then comes this beautiful explanation:
Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
A better country.
Maybe that’s what we’ve been longing for all along.
Not yesterday.
Not our childhood home.
Not the town where we raised our children.
Something better.
Something ahead of us.
Paul expresses the same idea:
But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Our memories may be behind us.
But our Home is ahead of us.
Heading Home
There’s another biblical story that comes to mind when I think about going home.
When God delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, He didn’t simply rescue them and immediately deposit them in the Promised Land.
There was a journey in between.
God had to lead them out of Egypt.
And in a sense, He also had to get Egypt out of them.
They had spent generations living as slaves. Even after they were physically free, they repeatedly looked backward, sometimes remembering Egypt more fondly than it deserved to be remembered.
At one point, when the journey became difficult, they actually said:
“We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic.”
—Numbers 11:5 (NIV)
Funny how nostalgia can work.
They remembered the menu.
They seemed to have forgotten the slavery.
Perhaps we’re not so different.
God is continually calling us forward, but sometimes part of us still wants to go back—to an earlier time, an easier season, a familiar place, or a previous version of ourselves.
But God isn’t merely leading us from somewhere.
He’s leading us toward something.
And along the way, He is changing us.
Maybe that’s part of what this journey toward Home is all about. God leads us out of our own versions of Egypt—the things that enslave us, define us, frighten us, or tempt us to turn backward. And then, with our cooperation, He patiently works the Egypt out of us.
Old habits.
Old fears.
Old attachments.
Old ways of thinking.
The journey matters because God isn’t simply preparing a place for us.
He’s preparing us for the place.
We can be grateful for where we’ve been without mistaking it for where we’re going.
Glimpses of Home
This changes the way I think about some of my favorite memories.
Maybe those wonderful moments weren’t simply experiences to enjoy and then mourn when they were gone.
Maybe they were glimpses.
Signposts.
Little previews of something better.
The warmth of family gathered around a table.
The security of being surrounded by people who love you.
The joy of laughter.
The beauty of creation.
The feeling that, for just a moment, everything is exactly as it should be.
Perhaps those moments awaken something within us because they resemble, however imperfectly, the Home for which we were created.
And maybe that’s why we can never quite recreate them.
They were never the destination.
They were pointing toward it.
A Place Prepared for Us
Shortly before His crucifixion, Jesus spoke words of comfort to His disciples:
“My Father’s house has many rooms… I am going there to prepare a place for you.”
I love the language Jesus uses.
My Father’s house.
A place for you.
He could have described eternal life in abstract theological terms.
Instead, He described something that sounds remarkably like…
Home.
A place where we belong.
Our eternal Home, prepared for us.
A place where the longing finally ends because we’ve arrived at what we were longing for all along.
Something Better Than Nostalgia
There’s nothing wrong with nostalgia.
I enjoy looking through old photographs.
I enjoy remembering our children when they were little.
I enjoy thinking about the adventures my wife and I have shared over the years.
Those memories are gifts.
But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking backward.
God isn’t calling me back there.
He was there, certainly. In those days.
But He’s also here.
And He’s leading me forward.
And He’s leading us forward.
There are still adventures ahead.
Still memories to make.
Still people to love.
Still work God has prepared for us to do.
And ultimately, there is a Home waiting for us that will make even our happiest memories seem like previews.
When We Finally Get Home
The Bible gives us a glimpse of what that Home will be like.
Near the end of Revelation, John writes:
Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.
And then:
He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain…
Think about that.
No goodbyes.
No growing apart.
No relationships broken by distance, disagreement, disease, or death.
No wonderful moment followed by the realization that it can’t last.
God Himself dwelling with us.
Perhaps that’s the place our best moments have been whispering about all along.
A Final Encouragement
So maybe Thomas Wolfe was right.
You can’t go home again.
I can’t return to the Colorado Springs where my wife and I were raising three young children.
I can’t step back into those Christmas mornings.
Those school years.
Those family dinners.
Those ordinary days that I didn’t realize at the time would someday become treasured memories.
And that’s okay.
I’m grateful for those years.
I treasure the memories.
I wouldn’t trade them for anything.
But I don’t need to go back.
Those years weren’t the destination.
They were part of the journey.
And perhaps some of the things I loved most about them—the laughter, the family, the belonging, the sense that for a moment everything was exactly as it should be—were little glimpses of something I’ve been longing for all along.
Home.
Not the home behind me.
The Home ahead of me.
Jesus said He has gone there to prepare a place for us.
So maybe Thomas Wolfe was only half right.
You can’t go home again.
But by the grace of God, you can go Home.
A Question to Sit With
What have I been longing to return to…
and could that longing actually be pointing me toward the Home God has prepared for me?
Master's Canvas - Writing & Photography by David K. Carpenter 