You Can't Go Home

You can’t go home. I’m sure you’ve all heard that saying before. But time and again we hear of people going back, trying to rejoin a time and place that has moved on. Can’t be done. I’ve tried.

I first attended school in a little town called Belgrade, in the state of Montana. We moved there shortly after my fourth birthday, and left shortly before my eighth. I can still picture our house, the neighborhood, the large open field stretching from the end of our street, continuing over to the old Northern Pacific mainline tracks perhaps a quarter of a mile away. On the other side was the main street, most of the houses and our school.

About 15 years after leaving Belgrade, my wife and I passed through the town. I took her out to the house I remembered so well. It was smaller now. It was also somewhat derelict. The names on the mailboxes next door were not what I remembered. Home wasn’t there anymore.

A couple of years after graduating from high school, I stopped by my former school during class hours. I found the choir room, wanting to visit my former choir director. He was there, but only briefly. Although he still directed the choir, he was also now teaching an accounting class. Fewer kids were signing up for singing groups. Two years later, he left teaching and went to work for a bank. Can’t go back to the old school either. It’s not there anymore, at least not the school I remember. Bricks and roofing, yes, but the experience can’t be revisited.

When my kids were ten or twelve, I drove them through the old neighborhood I'd lived in during my highschool years. The lot where I found the rubber boa I described a few weeks ago now had a house. The house I’d lived in needed paint. I took my son and daughter along the route I would have followed when I walked to school. The two-lane main street of Burien had given way to four lanes. Buildings had gone, buildings had come. It certainly wasn’t home anymore.

Prior to coming to DPS, I had spent six years as registrar at my college alma mater. The old administration building was the same, but offices had been rearranged and the folks in them were different. The whole valley was different. Even the climate had changed. When I was in school, most of the valley was given over to dry-land farming of wheat and peas. Now, with the addition of dams on the Snake River, much of the valley is under irrigation. The evaporation of water from the irrigated fields has greatly increased the humidity in the valley. Now, heavy long-lasting fogs are not uncommon in the winters where once there had been desert. It’s just not the same as I remember it being. It wasn’t “home”.

A few months ago, I was moved from one school to another. Now, I’ve been given the opportunity to return to the former school. I accepted the offer, but I’m not really going home. Some of my friends are retiring at the end of this year. My former principal has just accepted a position with the central office. My fifth-grade kids will have moved on. I can’t even go home less than a year after leaving.

We are destined to continue progressing through our experiences here, knowing that we can never go back to where we’ve been. No point in being homesick. The home you or I might be homesick for no longer exists. All of our longing really should point forward. There is one home, one we’ve never been to, yet, that deserves our longing, our attention. No, we can’t go back, but we can go forward.

Christ has promised us each a home, far greater, more joyous – filled with more love, filled with all the good things memories are made of. Yes, we must forget about looking back at what was never as good as our minds have made us think it was. Instead, we must look upward and onward, toward that which our minds can’t even begin to comprehend. Aren’t you just a little homesick for heaven? I am.

Dr. G