Sometimes I feel lost
Sometimes I feel lost. Not so much waking up on the wrong side of the bed, but on the wrong side of eternity. I feel, to borrow from John Moreland, “homesick for a home I’ve never had.”
Sometimes I feel lost. Not so much waking up on the wrong side of the bed, but on the wrong side of eternity. I feel, to borrow from John Moreland, “homesick for a home I’ve never had.”
The Welsh have a word for that. Of course, they do—they’re the only people who can make a shopping list sound like a hymn, lifting the most mundane mix of words into melodies that attract cherubim. I think the muses were born from the springs of Welsh valleys. Anyway, the word is hiraeth. It means homesickness, but it’s more than that. It speaks to an ache for something both familiar and estranged, something, someone, or someplace that perhaps never even existed. You know exactly what I mean.
Sometimes I feel like that.
It’s worth remembering, on those Tuesday mornings when dread shows up in your cereal, that “He has put eternity in our hearts,” as the beat poet of Ecclesiastes said. That’s both good and terrible news.
The good news? You’re not mad. And you’re not just made of matter. You have an appetite that would remain unfulfilled even if you lived as long as my Nana, who made it to 104. No one says it better than Lewis: “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
Maybe I’m no different from the guy in Finsbury Park who’s running up and down the half pipe, crying out with all kinds of claims and hallucinations. But I’m convinced that the gnawing and nagging of a soul made with eternity in mind—wrapped in a body that grows weaker every day—is something worth considering.
Perhaps that’s part of the work we’re here to do: pulling memories of our eternal home into this wilderness of exile. Perhaps we should try, as my friend Jon White says, to “remember the future.” Maybe we should plant gardens in Babylon until the streets start to remind us of the Eden we’ve heard about in lore and scripture. Perhaps beauty can really save the world!
Perhaps longing is what leads us to live more fully—because with every passing day, our appetite grows. Every good thing—the arms of your beloved, the ramen broth, the gassy smile from your baby, the hard work that pays off—it’s all a foretaste, a reminder of home.
Sometimes I feel lost, but that doesn’t mean I am lost. And I think the same is true of you.
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Beautiful 🤍 so well put. I often dwell on this homesickness, and it hits different when we somehow have hints of that place we still don't know. Imagine being homesick and concluding that feeling of coming back home will never be fulfilled...! A great reminder to keep our eyes up and our minds in eternity. Sometimes routine and daily life can take up too much space and plant seeds of ungratefulness and hopelessness.
Love also how Ecclesiastes and C.S. Lewis are capable of describing the feeling so poetically ✨ How important is to read! Others sometimes help us to put into words things we have been carrying for a long time.
Thank you for your part on that too 😄
God bless!
It's also the Welsh who have a very strong sense of thin places: caol áit. Places where the veil between the spiritual and material world is thin. It can be a sacred geographic place, but I think encounters with people, moments with a written word (or the Word), and musical refrains can also be thin places that help us see "through a glass, darkly."