Fernweh/Heimweh

There's a ineffable feeling that's been creeping on me the last handful of times I've been home. At first, it seemed like a mix of unaccustomed comfort, as well as a subtle ennui, born partly out of the lack of pain and movement. Over Christmas, these nebulous sensations crystallized into a simple thought: as I was laying on my bed rereading a Harry Potter book, nothing at all pressing, I thought, “I'm never going to be able to sit around and do nothing again.”

This is may be a rather obvious realization – as an adult, unless I resign myself to the life of an penniless itinerant, I'll have to work – but the reason that thought struck me so strongly was because it pointed out the rupture between past and present. Even if I were to move back to my house on Big Island, I will never be able to go back to the way it was when I was a kid, careless at home, in the warmth and love of my family.

I spent the first year on Oahu hating it, wanting nothing more than to go home and to be with my family, with the people who loved me most and who I loved most. And I still feel a strong desire to go home and be where I fit best, a piece of a larger organism, with roots linking us to one another. I want to go home, to have our camping trips at Laupahoehoe and glory in the warmth of friendship and the setting sun. But that damn ineffable feeling tells me that no road can lead home. I don't fit at home because I'm not the same as when I left. And home has changed too. We are all growing, like limbs of a tree, still connected to one another, but moving further from our roots. And even as we look back at home, there can not really be a return.

Sometimes I feel tired. I look out on my future, and it seems that the road extends far, far and I can't see anything but the dust swirling along barren, waterless paths. My feet are sore. And I want to go home. But heimweh is also fernweh. The only place we'll ever really be home again is when we stand together before the throne of God, delighting in His glory. The home that unites us is not the one that we've left behind, but the one ahead. And so I hope, picking up my weary feet and walk.

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being

renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of

glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are

unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

2 Corinthians 5:16-18