I Went Home And It Made It Worse

They had moved your chair.

That is not a metaphor. There is a chair in that kitchen that had been in one position for about eleven years, and at some point in October it was moved about four feet, and nobody thought to mention it because it was not a decision, it just happened.

And you walked in on the Friday and saw it and something went through you that you could not have explained to anybody in that room.

The whole weekend was like that. Small things. A different brand of something in the cupboard. Your younger brother had a joke with your parents that you did not understand and that they had to explain, which killed it. Somebody said we always on a Sunday about a thing that has been happening since about September.

Everybody was delighted to see you. Nobody did anything wrong. It was a good weekend.

And you got on the train back on the Sunday feeling considerably worse than when you had left, and you have not been able to say that to anybody, because the obvious question is what happened, and the honest answer is that a chair had been moved.

Here is what I want to name at the start. That weekend was not a failure and going was not a mistake, and the reason it hurt is not that the visit went badly.

It is that you found out something that you were always going to have to find out, and there is no version of it that is comfortable.

We remember the fish

There is a moment in Numbers where a whole people look back at somewhere they had left, and the detail in it is startling.

We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick. (Numbers 11:5, King James Version)

Five specific foods.

Not: we remember Egypt. Not a general nostalgia. Cucumbers. Melons. Leeks. Onions. Garlic. This is a group of people naming, precisely, the particular ordinary things they used to have, and the specificity is the whole character of the passage.

That is what homesickness is actually made of, and it is why nobody ever believes their own version of it: it is made of chairs and brands and jokes, and none of it sounds serious enough to be causing what it causes.

You are made homesick by chairs and by brands and not by anything grand, and the smallness of what does it has never once meant the thing itself is small. Numbers 11:5 lists five vegetables by name, and the Holy Spirit is the one on a train on a Sunday evening with somebody who cannot explain their own weekend.

Now the honest part of that passage, which is the reason it is in the book.

Those people were remembering something real and reading it wrongly. The fish had been free and the melons had been good, and both of those things were true, and it had also been the place they were slaves.

They were not lying. They were doing something everybody does with a place they have left: remembering it accurately and incompletely at the same time.

You are remembering accurately and incompletely at once, and a house that has moved on has never once been a house that stopped being yours. The written word records the memory in full without pretending it was false, and the Spirit of God is the one who holds a place in both hands at the same time.

What actually happened that weekend

Now let me describe the mechanism, because it will take the mystery out of the train journey. A household is a live thing and it adjusts continuously.

For eighteen years, you adjusted with it. Everything that changed in that house, changed with you in the room, so you never experienced any of it as change. It was simply what the house was, updated daily, imperceptibly.

Then you left, and the house kept adjusting through eleven weeks with nobody from your side of it in the room. And then you walked in and met the accumulated total of eleven weeks of tiny adjustments all at once, in about forty minutes.

That is what went through you when you saw the chair. Not grief about a chair. The compressed arrival of eleven weeks.

You are meeting eleven weeks compressed into a Friday evening, and a house adjusting while somebody is away has never once been a house forgetting them. The Holy Spirit is the one who explains a weekend that nobody in it could explain, and Numbers 11:5 names the ordinary specific things because that is what the mind actually holds.

And the second half, which is the part that will keep happening and is worth knowing in advance.

It gets less each time.

Not because the house stops changing, but because after two or three visits you will have recalibrated: you will stop expecting the house you left in September and start knowing the house as it is now. The gap is largest at the first return and it closes by itself.

Nobody tells anybody this, which is why the first visit home undoes so many people.

Finding a weekend hard is not a verdict on anybody.

You are in the widest part of a gap that closes on its own, and a first visit home has never once been the shape of every visit after it. Numbers 11:5 records the looking back at a specific moment in a journey rather than as a permanent condition, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody in the widest part of it.

Say what you noticed

So here is the thing to do, and the second half is what makes it possible at all.

Say to one person at home that the weekend was harder than you expected. And say what you noticed that was different.

The second half is what saves the first half from sounding like an accusation.

Because if you say only that it was hard, the person hearing it will search for what they did wrong, and there is nothing, and they will not find it and will worry.

You are able to say a hard thing and hand over the reason with it, and a difficulty with the cause attached has never once landed as an accusation. It is written in Numbers 11:5 that a whole people named the specific things they missed, and the Holy Spirit is the one in a phone call where somebody says what they noticed.

And say the actual specific thing. The chair.

It will feel absurd. It will feel like an enormous amount of feeling attached to a piece of furniture, and you will want to laugh while you say it or apologize for it.

Say it anyway, because it is true, and because the person on the other end will understand it instantly. Everybody who has ever come back to a house knows about the chair. They have their own version of it from their own life, and they will say so.

You are able to name the chair out loud, and a thing that sounds ridiculous has never once been ridiculous to somebody who has been through the same doorway. Scripture puts five vegetables in the record because those are the true contents of the memory, and the same Spirit who kept the list is on the call while you say what you noticed.

And if what the weekend opened is bigger than this, if it has begun to carry thoughts about not being here at all, that is not a thing to sit with on a train. Tell somebody today, out loud, in person if you can, and if it is urgent go to an emergency room or ring an emergency number where you are.