Nostalgia

 March 19, 2023

I read an article today that had an intriguing turn of a phrase: “a mysterious nostalgia for the future.” Nostalgia is usually connected to things in our past that we remember wistfully and with longing. Can we be nostalgic for something that hasn’t yet happened or that isn’t yet existent? How can you long for what you can’t see or haven’t known, to look wistfully to what is not yet? 

We can hope for something “out there,” but being nostalgic for it is a different way of thinking, a mindset that I think is very real, and comes from God, for whom time means nothing because he stands outside it. When he told Moses his Name is “I Am,” God was essentially telling him that past, present, and future are all alike to him. We measure time by the spinning of the earth upon its axis, or its journey around the sun, but the God who created all of that and more is not bound by the same linear journey we call life.

We humans dream of heaven because God has placed in us a longing for something we have somehow seen without having experienced it. We haven’t been to heaven, but we are nostalgic for it, dreaming of and hoping for it as strangers upon earth who know we were born for something more. When John the Revelator wrote of streets of gold and pearly gates, he somehow knew this was his real home, the place he longed to see again even though he had not been there before. We long for, are nostalgic for that home promised to those who are faithful to the end by Jesus Christ himself. 

This nostalgia for where we haven’t been is because we are, as St. Paul says, “in Christ,” who was there in eternity past. We long for what we have not, but he has seen. In him, his nostalgia becomes ours. He left that home for this place we call earth so he could take us to his home which is now ours because we are in him. This all sounds pretty ethereal and philosophic, but it is a reality for the Christian. We are in Christ who is home, and places that longing, that nostalgia in us till the day comes when faith shall become sight, and we awake from the dream to discover that what we dreamed is real.