From the retro fashion in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie to the throwback Gordita Supreme on Taco Bell’s Decades Menu and the Gen Z obsession with Friends, we’re surrounded by nostalgia.
Echoes from the past keep entering our current events. It’s like we’re wired to have wonder for what came before. What if that nostalgia is more than just a fashionable fad? What if these echoes point to something far more ancient and far bigger than a 90s sitcom?
Our word “nostalgia” comes from two words in ancient Greek: nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain). In its roots, nostalgia is homesickness—a longing for something we once had, then lost, and are trying to grasp again. We are homesick people. The nostalgia rippling through the contours of our culture illuminates a deeper homesickness in the crevices of our hearts.
In the biblical story, home is not simply a physical location with floors, walls, and a roof. Instead, home is a relational reality.
In Genesis, humanity is intentionally placed in a home to connect with God and with one another. In the Garden of Eden, they were naked and unashamed—vulnerable and safe to flourish (Gen. 2:25). Without minimizing the importance of our physical locations, Genesis defines home relationally. Home is a reality where we are seen, known, and loved by community and by our Creator.
This portrait of home is beautiful. We long for it. And yet, for many of us, it is far from the kind of home that defines our upbringing or our lives today. Home is not just what we were made for—it’s something we’re trying to manufacture again. How did we become so homesick?
Our displacement from home stems from a willful disconnection from our Creator. After rebelling against God and wrecking the home he made for them, Adam and Eve were exiled from the Garden. Later in the Old Testament, God’s people are sent into another exile because of their blatant refusal to love God and one another.
Isaiah 5:13 describes their homesickness:
“Therefore my people will go into exile for lack of understanding; those of high rank will die of hunger and the common people will be parched with thirst.”
There’s a connection between exile and longing. The nostalgia of the human heart creates a hunger and a thirst in all of us.
The woman sheltering a private online search history of images is actually searching for someone to see her. She is homesick.
The man cultivating gossip-laden conversation at the office is really trying to cultivate connection with community. He is homesick.
The couple going through a season of suffering gets plenty of knowledge from experts, but what they actually need is to be known by the people around them. They are homesick.
The students striving in athletics, academics, or for acceptance with a friend group are really striving for someone to love them. They may have a space where they eat and sleep, but they are desperately homesick.
To be human is to ache for that home God crafted for us. Yet the more we chase a version of home on our own terms, the further we get from it. We’re left with cheap imitations of “home” with no foundations to support the weight of our lives. Could things possibly get worse?
According to the Bible, the answer is an honest, unflinching “Yes.”
Our great problem isn’t simply that we’re far from home—it’s that we’re too far into the antithesis of home: we’re captives in the chains of sin, death, and evil.
The exiled people of God lamented:
“Some sat in darkness and in the shadow of death, prisoners suffering in iron chains, for they rebelled against the words of God . . .” (Psalm 107:10-11).
In his day, Jesus told a group of pious religious folks:
“I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin” (John 8:34).
The problem isn’t simply that we’re out of paradise, it’s that we’re in prison, held captive in chains by a power we can’t defeat or evade. Left to our own devices, we’re stuck as captives hoping for freedom—forever homesick, yet never home.
The gospel of Jesus breaks the chains of our homesickness with hope. In Luke 4, Jesus gives his first public sermon to a group of homesick people:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor . . . He has sent me to proclaim freedom to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Jesus is on a rescue mission for the captives. He’s coming not just to save them from prison but into a forever home with him.
Isaiah 25 describes our forever home as a feast with aged wine and the finest of meats. This feast celebrates the victory over the formerly insurmountable enemy through Jesus’s death and resurrection: “he will swallow up death forever.” We will again connect with God and one another at home. Forever. This is the feast that will finally satisfy our great hunger and thirst.
All of us want to be at that feast, yet we wonder if we’ll actually have a spot at the table. How do we get a reservation for that party?
When Jesus described what it would be like to be in the forever home with him, his friend Thomas asked how he could know the way there. Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:5-6).
Jesus isn’t offering us a plan for the way home that we need to execute. He is the way home.
The story of the gospel is a homecoming story. But it stands in contrast to the competing homecoming stories of the world. Every other religion or worldview is pitching a way for us to make our way home on our own power. In the gospel of Jesus, we don’t make our way toward home. Home is coming to us. Every echo of home points us to Jesus—the one who truly sees us, knows us, and loves us.
The homecoming of the gospel changes everything for us. But does it change enough to impact our day-to-day lives? How do we live as people of the homecoming?
Yet, what’s most interesting about Lake Huacachina is where it’s located: in the middle of the Peruvian desert. The lake and the vegetation are an oasis surrounded by desert.
It’s a place that manages to be both radically different from its environment and yet radically restorative to its environment.
The different and restorative nature of Huacachina is a small image of who we’re meant to be as people of the homecoming.
Peter describes how we live differently in exile with our newfound gospel freedom:
“Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as servants of God.” (1 Peter 2:16)
As servants of God, we live with the grain of how God made the world to work, which is often against the grain of how our culture wants the world to work. We’ll be different in the way we engage with work, sexuality, school, politics, and parenting. We don’t live differently to draw attention to ourselves but to draw attention to God himself. We are freed people spotlighting the King who brings us home.
In another letter to exiles, we learn what it means to live restoratively while we wait for our final homecoming:
“Pursue the well-being of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it thrives, you too will thrive.” (Jeremiah 29:7).
To live restoratively is to be engaged for the life of a community. Its well-being isn’t just hoped for—it’s pursued.
Followers of Jesus restore life through their very presence: their words, thoughts, and habits cultivate life wherever their feet land. They pray for their neighbors, co-workers, and roommates. When they spend time in a place, that place has the God-designed tendency to thrive.
Different and restorative.
People of the homecoming are called to be a little bit like Lake Huacachina. Radically different from our environment, yet also radically restorative to our environment. Our tendency is to do one or the other (or neither). But God freed us to be an oasis in a thirsty desert, and that means we must be both different and restorative.
When we do this, we live as a present-tense preview of a future reality. We are living pictures of our forever home. That echo of nostalgia is meant to reverberate through our lives into our neighborhoods, workplaces, and dorm rooms. But instead of pointing people to a trending show or faddish fashion, our lives direct people to Jesus—to the one who is making all things new and preparing a feast for us.
When people encounter followers of Jesus, they should get a sense of what it feels like to be truly seen, known, and loved––they should get a sense of what it feels like to be home again.