Holding On to Home

A few years ago, I sat in my parents’ living room surrounded by American Girl dolls, a Cinderella Barbie, an old stuffed Grover, the purple doily knitted by my grandmother, a Home Alone 2 Talkboy, and a collection of Texas memorabilia from that phase when I wanted to be Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. After spending years stored in four large bins, my childhood possessions had been evicted from my parents’ garage.

Sorting my scrapbooks, journals, and trinkets brought back the lighthearted days of girlhood, before the cares of adulthood weighed me down. Financial, physical, and mental struggles—I’d faced them all since last opening those bins. The longer I sat with the beloved items, the more I hesitated to part with them. They felt strangely like home.

Nostalgia is quite literally homesickness, the sentimental longing for a former place or time when we perceive that life was happier or easier. Nostalgia is a natural reaction to the sense that this broken world is not how it was meant to be. We innately long for a time farther back than we can remember—to the perfect world before Adam bit the forbidden fruit.

But if we’re not careful, a pleasant jaunt down memory lane can morph into an obsessive escape from what we perceive as an unjust or harsh reality. I might have called myself a packrat, hoarding reminders of my childhood years. But reunited with those precious items, I realized that in yearning to escape the present, I had made an idol of the past.

The Good Old Days

Millennials—including me—love little more than revisiting trends of the 1980s and 1990s. The entertainment industry obliges with reboots of favorite shows and movies like The Magic School Bus and Fuller House along with a live-action Lion King and a record-breaking Top Gun sequel. Even McDonald’s recently cashed in on the nostalgia craze by offering adult Happy Meals. We can play new iterations of the beloved Animal Crossing and Oregon Trail video games. On clothing store racks hang high-rise jeans and garish neon crop tops.

Lisa Sciulli, a marketing professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, explains why nostalgia sells: “It’s a psychological thing. You feel comfort when you go back in time. . . . You reminisce about when times were simpler.”

My generation sentimentalizes the ’80s and ’90s, our childhood years of youthful joy and hope. America felt so safe and prosperous that we felt limitless. Then the Twin Towers and the stock market fell and with them the security of an entire generation. Many are anxious because they fear things will never be good again, and many more are depressed because they can’t see a way out.

Generations over 50 can find themselves reminiscing about “the good old days,” having grown up in an era of more moral certainty. Their parents and grandparents fought the World Wars and set America at the top of the globe. They see a struggling twenty-first century America and long for days of perceived biblical morality and heroism.

No matter our generation, if we believe that the past was a better time, we grieve what we’ve lost—the people no longer with us, our youth, finances, sense of security, cultural morality, and general ease of life. Without a proper perspective, we might resent people or governments or even God for disrupting our comfort and security.

The Purpose of the Present

The problem with nostalgia is that it doesn’t tell the whole truth: no time in the past was ideal because no time since Adam’s fall has been. God’s hand is ever over history, and by his grace, every era has known troubles and triumphs. The past has fulfilled its purpose—to prepare us for God’s work in the present.

The problem with nostalgia is that it doesn’t tell the whole truth.

Jesus told his disciples, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62). A farmer plowing his field must keep his eyes on where he’s going. If he turns back to see where he’s been, his plow line goes off course. That’s the message that Jesus has for us today: Keep your eyes on where you’re going, not on where you’ve been.

Like the Apostle Paul, we must forget what lies behind and reach for what lies ahead (Philippians 3:13–14). Whether we’re looking back or forward, our goal should not be to escape our present suffering but to endure all things with hope (Romans 5:3–5). The hard times we experience today are part of our sanctification. They also present an opportunity for us to share our immutable and steadfast Savior with a lost and suffering world (Hebrews 13:8).

Whether we’re looking back or forward, our goal should not be to escape our present suffering but to endure all things with hope.

Believers need not escape to a past era for our peace or happiness—not when the Comforter dwells inside us (2 Corinthians 1:3–5). We cannot make temples to the past in our minds when we are the temples of the Holy Spirit today.

The Necessity of Nostalgia

Nostalgia isn’t all bad. In fact, research shows that nostalgia unifies families and cultures and gives us a sense of what we want the future to look like. In Jeremiah 6:16, God directs his people to reflect on the paths of their godly fathers and to walk forward in that direction.

Instead of indulging in unbridled nostalgia, we can recall God’s past blessing and anticipate his future provision. God told Israel, “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing” (Isaiah 43:19). His glorious deeds of the past can’t compare to his blessings in the future.

No Turning Back

I haven’t missed the weight that those bins of childhood relics added to my life. Besides the physical weight of lugging them from apartment to apartment, there was the burden of a past I couldn’t hold on to. I sold some of the toys, gave the dolls to my nieces, and kept only a few meaningful items. I am no longer the naïve girl playing with those toys in an idyllic youth. The passing time has strengthened my faith as God provided through financial difficulties, comforted me through illness, and remained faithful in frightening times.

We’re living far from Eden, in the shadow of Adam’s sin and our own. But even Adam and Eve did not find hope in their memories of the garden to which they could not return, but rather in their promised offspring—the Son who would die on a cross, rise victorious over sin and death, and one day restore all things. In our heavy longing for home, we can turn our eyes from Eden and look forward to “an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17–18).