by Rachel Baik
I’ve always loved long car rides.
When I was younger, there was a game I used to play from the back seat of my family’s beat up minivan. Soaking in the passing scenery, I would ask myself: which of these would I like to call home?
Maybe the glamorous high rise poking out from the Los Angeles skyline, or the mansion nestled into the Calabasas mountainside. Perhaps even — and this was for the days where fantasy and the imagination roamed free — the overgrown bush marking the entrance to the freeway we took each week to church; untold mysteries hidden within its depths.
The game evolved as childhood slipped from my shoulders. Instead of unmarked buildings and magical shrubberies, I started to look for home in even less traditional spaces. In cliques and romance, accomplishments and career, I was desperate to find the place where I felt I truly belonged.
Homesickness. It’s a concept that transcends culture and ethnicity, a universal human experience so closely knitted with the desire to belong.
I found this desire compelled me in more ways than one. The clothes I wore, the way I acted. My manner of speech and the places I invested my time. So desperate was I to find this elusive home, that I shaped who I was around the search.
My body broke down in the summer of 2016 during a missions trip to Panama. An unexpected career change into vocational ministry left me abandoning all I had worked for until that point. Void of community and struggling to meet my self-imposed expectations of ministry, the full weight of this sense of failure was exaggerated abroad: I couldn’t preach, I struggled to lead, and all in all, I felt horribly alone.
True to the term, my body grew sick. My roommate found me sleeping in the dark, shivering under a pile of borrowed sleeping bags with a 106ºF fever. The team doctor rushed in and ordered an ice bath to cool me down. Despite the high body temperature, I shivered violently as they peeled the layers upon layers of blankets and clothing from me; and when the icy water hit my skin, I began to weep. I cried for the physical pain I couldn’t express, too weak for sound to escape my throat. I cried for the ache in my heart, wearied from the failure to find a home. “Just let me die,” I prayed in the moment, “It’s too much.”
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?” (Jn 14:1-2, NIV)
“I’m here,” the Father said. He was gentle in his tone, firm in his delivery. “Don’t worry, I’m here.”
“I can’t do it anymore,” I responded, continuing to cry.
“I’m here,” he said again. “And if I’m here, then you’re safe.”
The tears fell freely but as they did, I began to realize the hands that caught them. People and position couldn’t give me what I wanted, because it was never theirs to give. The reason I had been struggling so deeply, the answer to the constant uprootedness I felt in the everyday became clear: I could not belong here because I was never meant to. My home was already bought in Heaven.
Homesickness plagues us when the destination remains elusive; our bones begin to ache and our strength gradually fails. But homesickness whose end is clear, where an ‘x’ marks the spot to a treasure untold, motivates us to push forward. When we become aware of our place in the Father’s home, we run this race with the endurance of Hebrews 12. We sprint earnestly forward, “forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead” (Phil. 3:13), eager to fall into the Father’s waiting embrace.
“Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience” (Heb. 4:11, ESV)
I took a trip a couple months back, to do ministry in a foreign country. It was a low-income nation and the accommodations reflected the fact. There was no bed, no running water or reprieve from the many insects that came biting in the night. Each morning I woke up tired and at night I went to sleep covered in the evidence of the demands of the day. But despite all this, the time was more than bearable because I knew it would come to an end. I knew with a resounding clarity that this discomfort was only momentary. Waiting on the other side was the promise of my home.
It’s this same knowing that grants me peace in my daily life. I can run with all my strength despite what may, because of what I know.
Though the journey is long and oftentimes arduous, it will come to an end; and when it does, it will have been worth it. But until it does, we can rest with the peace of knowing that at the end of the road is a Father waiting to welcome us home.
Rachel Baik currently lives in Flushing, NY but will always consider LA to be her home. She began ministry at the age of 21 unprepared and more than a little bit scared, but has witnessed God pull through time and time again. Watching the lost be found, the broken, healed; and the orphan embraced by the Father has been worth every risk. Being allowed to partner with the Spirit in this Kingdom work has been the greatest privilege of her life. Currently, Rachel serves as the high school pastor for Arumdaun Presbyterian Church in Bethpage, NY and is finishing up her M.Div at Alliance Theological Seminary.