Have you ever felt so homesick after going away for a few days? If you have, then you know the loneliness that it brings.
Homesickness is a terrible thing. The Counselling Services website at the University of Warwick says that according to research, homesickness is very prevalent among students go leave home to study at university. These students suffer from various physical and emotional problems such as:
- loss of concentration
- crying and sadness
- difficulties in sleeping or eating
- waves of emotion
- disrupted menstrual cycle
- nausea, headaches or dizziness
- trembling, and feeling either too hot or too cold
If homesickness affects university students this bad, then we should realize just how much "spiritual homesickness" affects us.
What is spiritual homesickness?
It may not be explicitly mentioned in the Bible, but I believe that spiritual homesickness is that terrible condition characterized by being separated from God because of sin.
You see, homesickness affects people away from and missing their homes, their families and the people that matter the most to them. We feel this whenever we're miles away from our spouses and family members on some trip or function that we deem important.
Spiritual homesickness, however, is totally different.
The Bible tells us that God "has put eternity in [our] hearts," which means we as spiritual beings will always long for Him (see Ecclesiastes 3:11). However, because of sin, we're separated from Him:
"But your iniquities have separated you from your God; And your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He will not hear." (Isaiah 59:2)
Because we have been separated from God, we experience homesickness, an insatiable longing to return to Him. Adam likely felt this when he was cast out of the garden with his wife Eve, and until today we feel it:
"Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned." (Romans 5:12)
How do we overcome spiritual homesickness?
By now we ought to have understood that all of us have been separated from God because of sin. Because we are separated from God, we all experience spiritual homesickness.
Just like how natural homesickness can be cured by coming home, spiritual homesickness can be cured by coming home -- by turning our backs on sin and returning to God through the Lord Jesus Christ.
Christ Jesus is able to continually undo all the effects of sin in our lives (see 1 John 3:8). When we come to Him and put our trust in Him, He gives us the life that God wants for us:
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." (John 3:16)
This is how we overcome spiritual homesickness: by coming to the one who is able to restore us to God the Father, and allows us to become sons, not orphans or aliens.
"But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." (John 1:12-13)
