Coming Home For Christmas
There is a feeling that comes with Christmas that is hard to describe, but everyone knows it when it arrives. It comes with familiar songs, old decorations pulled out of boxes, the smell of baking, and the sound of voices we haven’t heard in a while. It is a feeling we often call nostalgia.
The Ache We Call Nostalgia
That word comes from two Greek words: nostos, meaning “homecoming,” and algos, meaning “longing” or even “ache.” Nostalgia is not just remembering the past. It is the ache for home—for things as they were, or as they should be. At Christmas, that feeling is especially strong. We want to go back. We want to gather. We want to come home.
A Longing Placed in Us by God
That longing is not an accident. God placed it in us.
When we hear the Christmas story again—the angels, the shepherds, the manger—it doesn’t feel like a new story. It feels like a story we have always known. Children act it out year after year, and adults never seem to tire of hearing it. That is because this story speaks to something deep in us: the desire to belong, to be gathered, to be safe, to be home.
A Story That Feels Like Home
And so Christmas is not only about remembering something that happened long ago in Bethlehem. It is about God coming to meet our longing. In Jesus, God does not wait for us to find our way home. He comes down into our world. He is born into a family. He is laid in a manger. He makes His home among us.
God Comes Down to Meet Our Longing
That is why the Church feels like home, especially at Christmas. We come back to familiar hymns. We hear words we have heard since we were children. We sit in the same pews. We light the same candles. The Church does not chase trends or constantly reinvent itself, because home is not supposed to be new every year. Home is where you return. Home is where you are known. Home is where you are welcomed, even when you are tired, distracted, or burdened.
The Church as a Place to Come Home
For children, church becomes part of their Christmas memory. Years from now, long after the costumes are packed away and the decorations are faded, they will remember singing these songs, and hearing again that Jesus was born for them. God is quietly planting a sense of nostos—a memory of home—that will call them back again and again.
Planting Memories of Home in Our Children
But even this is not the final home. Christmas also points us forward. The child born in the manger grows up, carries our sins, dies on the cross, and rises again to open the way to our true home. Scripture tells us that we are “strangers and exiles” here, longing for a better country—a heavenly one. The ache we feel at Christmas is not only for the past. It is for the future God has promised.
Christmas Points Us to Our True Home
So when Christmas stirs that warm, bittersweet longing in your heart, recognize it for what it is. It is God reminding you that you belong—to Him, to His Church, and to a home that is still coming.
Come Home—and Be Brought Home Forever
So, come home to church. And in Christ, you will be brought home forever.
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