No Continuing City

It happens most often on the flyover, of all places, coming into the city from the north with the whole of it laid out in front of him.

He looks at it and something in his chest says, quite clearly, this is not it.

The place he means does not exist any more in the form he wants. The house has other people in it. The shop closed. Two of the people who made it what it was are dead and one has moved to Canada, and even if he drove there tomorrow, which he could, he would be standing in a street that is only geographically the same.

So he cannot go back. Not because of distance. Because the thing he is homesick for is not a location and never was.

He has been treating this as a fault for about six years. Something he ought to have grown out of. He is a grown man with a mortgage and a life and a city he can drive without thinking, and there is no respectable version of I am homesick and there is nowhere to be homesick for, so he has never said it to anybody.

That is your flyover. That is your chest. And I want to say something about it, because there is a half-verse in Hebrews that treats that exact ache as accurate.

The ache is reading correctly

The writer of Hebrews is talking to people who have lost their standing, their community and in some cases their homes, and he says something short about cities.

For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come.Hebrews 13:14

No continuing city.

That is not said as a warning or a rebuke. It is said as a plain description of how things are. There is no city that continues. Not the one you left, which has already stopped continuing and proved it. Not the one on the flyover, which will change out of recognition in forty years the way yours did.

And then: but we seek one to come. The ache is not treated as a malfunction to be corrected. It is treated as a homing instrument pointing at something that exists.

You have a homesickness that is reading correctly. Not a failure to settle. The written word says plainly that no city continues and then names what the wanting is for, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man on a flyover at half five.

Now let me say something about the place you left, because six years of this can turn it into a paradise it was not.

It was a real place with damp and bus timetables. Some of what you miss is the people, and some of it is being twenty-two, and some of it is a version of that street that only ever existed for about four years in the middle of the nineties. All of that is worth loving and none of it is worth measuring your current life against.

You are not living in the wrong life. The written word does not treat a lost home as an error you must retrace. The Holy Spirit was in that street then and He is on this flyover now.

And now the shame, which is the real cost of the six years.

You have thought this made you weak. A grown man missing something that has gone. But the verse puts everybody in that same condition, permanently, as a feature of the arrangement rather than a personal weakness.

You are not carrying a fault. Here have we no continuing city, and we is everybody. The Holy Spirit has been with you on that flyover every time your chest said this is not it, and He did not correct you.