The unbearable weight of Home

I know where I belong – and it's not here.

I can make any place feel familiar by popping Gilmore Girls on in the background. It was the constant soundtrack of my teens, and my mom and I watched it religiously because we were freaked out by what a living embodiment of Lorelai and Rory we seemed to be.

It plays in the background now, and as I type to the rhythm of its comforting, fast-pace dialogue, I have the familiar ache of missing my mom. I feel the daily consequence of my choice to follow where my life was blooming, over 5,000 miles away, and even after 12 years, I never cease to miss the family I left behind.

The call of “Home,” I realise, is one that not everyone experiences. Many of my friends say that Home is wherever their spouse is, which is a beautiful sentiment, and one I can understand in part. Home is, in a sense, wherever my husband is, for without him, I couldn’t make any place Home. But right now, as we live together in a residential nowhere season, we BOTH feel the unbearable weight of some bigger type of Home – like a magnet pulling our hearts and minds and limbs back to where we belong.

I’ve felt that magnetic pull since about age 7 – this unexplainable need to be somewhere that wasn’t here. No, not just somewhere that wasn’t here – somewhere else specifically. My heart longed for England when I was still too young to even know the word for it. I wasn’t just living in a state of discontent (no matter how the barren desert was where I grew up); it was as if my very bones were rattling against the reverberating call to go North.

Without understanding it, I was drawn to everything which haled from these green and pleasant lands. I’d never heard of Jane Austen the first time I saw a preview for Pride & Prejudice in the movie theatre and just knew that I had to go and see it for my 12th birthday. I was completely oblivious to the fact that my favourite film, The Princess Bride – which I’d play on repeat in my bedroom whenever I’d come home from a hard day at school – was filmed in the Derbyshire countryside, not 20 minutes from where I’d one day find myself living. If only I could have told High School Christina what kind of life lay in store for her.

BookToks and Bookstagrams might show that I was certainly not unique in my Anglophilia – a young, white American woman enthralled with the romance of Westley and Mr. Darcy… what else is new? But it was always more than that for me. It wasn’t simply a romance with the men who laced these stories, but with the land that bore the stories themselves.

It was an impulsive fascination with how the evening light glowed through the long grass by a lake in Kent, the rays of evening sun reverberating off the water onto the the summer insects frittering about – as if the air itself sparkled in gratitude for the rare British warmth. It was the way that words seemed to dance out of people’s mouths. The way that a flute and a fiddle, played in a small corner of the local pub, could light me up like a match, filling me with this deep sense of “On earth as it is in Heaven” as my body danced and I lost myself to the happiness ringing in my ears.

In my teenage days of battling OCD, I’d close my eyes and find myself walking down a grove of trees (a grove which I’d later find myself walking down when my husband was first courting me in the hills of the Peak District). I’d never seen these trees in a photograph, and yet at 14-years-old, my soul knew them. My heart recognised them.

One day, I’d celebrate my marriage behind that grove of trees.

I have no way of describing this bizarre connection to a place other than it was made by God. Clearly, some of us have Home planted in them, and we are practically compelled to water that seed until it blooms. To weather storms and refresh the soil and figure out how to nurture it into the dazzling life that longs to be.

But with this sense of Home comes a heavy weight – as if you cannot deny that a piece of yourself goes missing when you cannot safely return to dwell there. And when you are a poor soul whose Home called you far from your loved ones, the entanglement of belonging and loss stings all the more.

To follow that magnetic pull, I have to live with the daily hole of not having my mom nearby. Not getting to watch my brother grow up. Not being able to hold them when they’re sick or hurting, or hug them on their birthdays. Not being held myself when I feel the desperate need for comfort that only a mamma can fill. In this way, I again understand how Home can also be people. And unfortunately for me, I had to sacrifice one to find the other. So Gilmore Girls plays in the background, offering me some vague source of comfort in the absence of one part of myself.

And the loss goes on.

Currently, my husband and I are living in a beautiful little countryside village in the midlands. We have a canal that we can walk by daily, and rolling fields which dance in the wind with a beautiful, Austenianesque estate overlooking us. We have a gorgeous house filled with colour and light and comfort. We couldn’t be more blessed. The quaintness is almost unbelievable.

But it is not Home. For either of us. Our community, our lives, our church, our very breath seems to dance on the wind of the Peak District back North. I didn’t know it when I was younger, but it was not simply England which called my name, but North Derbyshire. The countryside which unknowingly filled my screen with escapism all my life. It was my Home. It’s always been my Home. And God knew it when He landed me there in beautiful happenstance at 18-years-old.

I look out at the jetting rocks of Stanage Edge or gaze across Hope Valley or walk through the woods around Lady Bower reservoir, and the electric “ringing” in my bones comes alive. I come alive. My husband and I both. We are safe. We are awe-struck. We feel the deepest beauty that God has to offer lingering in every leaf and rock. This earth, in this place, declares the glory of God in exactly the melody that we understand.

To be without it is like being without a limb, and I still don’t know how to navigate this beautiful but foreign season of residential limbo. This season of home and not Home. There is guilt for not feeling able to embrace where God has brought us in this chapter of our lives. There is frustration at feeling “stuck in the past.” But there is also that heavy, undeniable weight on my chest – that same familiar sensation which filled my days as I lay in my childhood bedroom, watching Darcy walk through the fields and Buttercup race along the ravine floor by Westley’s side. There is a comfort in knowing where one belongs, even when one can’t be there. How many of us ache for this feeling, only to never find it?

So we live in the tension of the unbearable weight of Home, finding gratitude in our beautiful displacement until our loving God sees fit to hitch us back on a current of wind which will lead us North. And even then, my family still won’t be there. A different limb will be missing.

Perhaps this is what it means to understand that no place on earth will be our true Home until we see the fulfilment of God’s goodness in the land of the living. Because Home is, for me, a place, but it’s also people. I don’t think I’ve ever felt a closer sense of Heaven than on my wedding day, as I danced to the sound of a fiddle in the hills of the Peak District, with nearly everyone I loved there, all in one place. It was like my chest could literally explode within me. I have never known, and have not known since, such indescribable Joy.

It’s a Joy that C.S. Lewis speaks of often. This Joy that captures you in a split second, where the veil of Heaven and Earth appear thin for only a moment, and you find yourself so enraptured by it that you spend days, months, trying to get that split second back.

All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still 'about to be'.
C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

For me, this constant ache of Home in place and Home in person only serves to remind me that Eternity is real. That there is an “about to be” that we still have to look forward to. Whether you know what it’s like to be drawn to a particular country or town, or whether you simply know that Home is wherever you’re with your loved ones, I promise you that the electrifying state of belonging is merely a glimpse of the glory to come. And for that reason, for the hope set before me, I continue to bear the unbearable weight of Home.

All my love,