It Is Not The House, It Is Her

It is not the house.

You worked that out somewhere around week five, and it was a surprise, because homesickness is supposed to be about a place and everybody talks about it that way.

You do not particularly miss the town. You do not miss the house. You miss your grandmother, specifically, and the missing has a shape and a time attached to it, which is about four in the afternoon, which is when you used to go round there.

And you have never said this to anybody, because it sounds absurd.

That is genuinely why. Not embarrassment about the feeling. It is that missing your grandmother sounds like a small thing when other people are talking about missing home, and there is a particular kind of silence that follows a person saying something that other people find slightly odd, and you would rather not produce it.

So it has been a private thing since about week five, and the four o'clocks have been getting worse rather than better.

Here is what I want to say before anything else. The specificity is not a smaller version of homesickness. It is the actual thing, and everybody else's version has a name in it too. They are just describing theirs as a place.

Being mindful of thy tears

There is a sentence in Second Timothy where Paul says something about missing one particular person, and it is startling how personal it is.

Greatly desiring to see thee, being mindful of thy tears, that I may be filled with joy. (2 Timothy 1:4, King James Version)

Greatly desiring to see thee.

Not: I miss the church there. Not: I think often of the work in that region. To see thee, which is one person, named earlier in the letter, and the desire is stated without any qualification or any embarrassment at all.

And this is Paul. A man with an enormous life and a great many concerns, writing what is probably one of his last letters, and one of the things he puts in it is that he wants to see a particular young man.

You are missing one person by name, and a specific ache with somebody in it has never once been smaller than a general one. The Holy Spirit is the one in a room at four in the afternoon, and Second Timothy 1:4 names the desire to see one individual and attaches no apology to it.

And notice the detail he includes: being mindful of thy tears.

He is remembering a specific occasion. Something happened, Timothy cried, and Paul is carrying the memory of that particular moment around with him and mentions it in a letter.

That is not a general fondness. That is a person holding a specific afternoon in their mind.

You have specific afternoons in you that belong to somebody, and a memory with a time on it has never once been sentimental in a way anybody should apologize for. The written word keeps the particular detail rather than a general warmth, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person miss a person.

Why it sounds absurd and is not

Now the practical part, and it is about why this has stayed private for six weeks.

Missing a place is socially acceptable and missing a person is not.

That is the whole of it, and it makes no sense at all when it is looked at directly. A person can say I really miss home at any dinner table and everybody nods. A person who says I really miss my grandmother produces a small pause, and then sympathy of a slightly different quality, and everybody feels somebody has said a thing.

But the person saying they miss home also misses somebody. They just have not gone in as far as you have.

You have gone in further and named the actual thing, and a person who can say who they miss has never once been more sentimental than a person who said where. Second Timothy 1:4 names an individual rather than a location, and the Holy Spirit is the one who honors an accurate word.

And here is the cost of keeping it private, which is the reason to do something rather than simply understand it.

She does not know.

That is the practical fact underneath all of this. There is a woman going about her week who has no idea that she is the thing that a person four hundred miles away is missing at four in the afternoon.

And that woman is very likely missing you in exactly the same specific way, at approximately the same hour, and neither of you has said one word about it.

Missing a person is not a verdict on anybody.

You are able to end a silence that two people are keeping separately, and a person who does not know they are missed has never once been able to say that they miss you back. The Spirit of God is the one who moves a thing from the inside of somebody into the air between two people, and 2 Timothy 1:4 puts the desire into a letter rather than leaving it in a man.

Ring her and say the actual thing

So here is the thing to do, and it is one phone call and one sentence in it.

Ring her this week. And say that the missing has her name on it and not the town's.

The word specifically is doing work there and it should stay in.

Because I miss you is a sentence that gets said at the end of every call by everybody and means almost nothing by now. I have been missing you specifically, more than the house, is a completely different sentence, and it will land in a way that the first one has not landed in years.

You are able to say the accurate version rather than the automatic one, and a true sentence about who has never once been the same as a polite one about where. It is written in Second Timothy 1:4 that a man greatly desired to see one particular person and put it in writing, and the Holy Spirit is the one on a call where somebody says the accurate thing.

And say the four o'clock part if you can manage it.

That is the detail that turns a nice sentence into a real one. I keep noticing it at about four. Because it tells her something true about the shape of your week, and it gives her a specific thing to hold, and specific things are what people actually keep.

You will probably find out that she has one of her own.

You are able to hand her a detail she can keep, and a specific hour named out loud has never once been too small a thing to give somebody. Scripture keeps the tears and the desire and the particular occasion all in one short verse, and the same Spirit who kept it that specific is on the call while you say it.

And if what is running at four in the afternoon has stopped being about missing somebody and started to be about not being here at all, that does not wait for a phone call. 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.