I can’t stop listening to “Where I’m From,” the new single from one of my favorite bands, Colony House. Here’s why:
The song begins with these lines:
Where I’m from
Illuminated lanterns glow
And never flicker
When storm winds blow
The singer, Caleb Chapman, is telling us about his homeland. The first image that he uses to describe it is one of safety and security: lights that provide direction through the storms of life. The singer’s home offers comfort and hope that no bitter wind can snuff out. Next, the singer describes some sensory experiences that remind him of his homeland:
The scent of cedar
The taste of citrus on my tongue
The sounds of silence
All feel like home
The singer’s home is a place of profound beauty – a rich landscape of smells, tastes, and sounds to be savored. It’s a place of wonder. Furthermore, it’s also a place of relationship:
I can see it in the eyes of my son
And the eyes of my daughter
Where I’m from
What is this home that the song is describing? The first and most obvious answer is this: it’s our home. It’s the earth beneath our feet, the world that we navigate each and every day. How long has it been since we noticed it? How long has it been since we felt gratitude for the security and stability that it provides – the way that it spins like a well-oiled machine through space, the way that our bodies adapt to changing seasons (and somehow survive puberty), the ways that soil and sky and seas cooperate to enable our day-to-day existence? How long has it been since we marveled at out own ability to see? How long has it been since we noticed the strange beauty in the faces of the people around us?
Next, these lines:
Where I’m from
The lost and broken sing along
In every language
A sacred song
Here is an image of unity amidst diversity. Home is a place where needy people, those who have been wounded by life’s struggles, find belonging. As a Christian, I hear in these lyrics a simple and beautiful description of the Church. I don’t mean a building – the word “church” was never meant to describe that. I mean the people of God – followers of Jesus Christ around the world who gather regularly to pray and worship together, singing a common song in spite of our cultural differences. These lines are also an echo of Revelation 7:9-10, a passage of the Bible which describes the apostle John’s vision of the afterlife:
“After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: ‘Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.'”
Together, these words and Colony House’s lyrics paint a picture of redeemed community. The unity that they depict is founded on gratitude for salvation – the great rescue that was made possible by Christ’s sacrifice. However, the beauty of this vision is tainted by a painful ache. Such glorious unity seems incredibly distant from the world that we inhabit. Our planet is wracked by toil and turmoil, division and despair, prejudice and pain. If we were made for this world, then why does it feel like a foreign country? If we’re truly at home here, then why do we still yearn for home? The singer echoes this tension:
Here, I labor on in the holy war
Find myself on the threshing floor
Praying somebody will stay with me
While I remain in between
Looking for light and the breaking of day
Somebody stay with me
With these lines, Colony House asks a question that continues to haunt each of our hearts, whether we recognize it or not. The question is this: Where do we belong? Is this busted-up yet beautiful land truly our land? If so, then why do we feel a sense of exile and disjointedness? Why, in the midst of life’s suffering, do we feel that something about our planet has gone horribly wrong, that it could and should have been otherwise? Catholic philosopher G.K. Chesterton asked a similar question in his book Orthodoxy:
How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our town?
Author and literature professor C.S. Lewis experienced this feeling of strangeness as well, and connected it to something that he described with the German word sehnsucht. Sehnsucht is defined by Lewis as “the inconsolable longing in the human heart for we know not what.” It’s the persistent, often unnoticed yearning that we feel when the clamor around us stops and the bustle slows down, the nagging ache in our bones that we can’t seem to get rid of, even in our moments of joy. According to Lewis, this ache is often aroused by experiences of deep beauty, and it brings both pleasure and pain. He described it like this:
“That unnameable something, desire which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.”
In Lewis’s eyes, the seemingly universal experience of sehnsucht-longing was evidence that humanity was in exile, that this rusting and ruined world was not the endgame, and that we were made for another place:
“If I find in myself desires nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”
If you’re like me, if you resonate with Lewis’s remarks and recognize the inconsolable longing within your heart, you may still find yourself feeling uneasy at the idea that this world is not humanity’s home. Many of the world’s religions envision the afterlife as an escape from this world, and frankly, many of the ways that people depict the afterlife in songs and movies are super trippy. Numerous religions have told us that our world is a cage that we must be liberated from, whether by achieving enlightenment and ascending out of our bodies, merging with a spirit realm, or strumming harps on repeat in a cloudy, colorless paradise that bears a sickening resemblance to cotton candy. Christian history isn’t exempt from these images and ideas. While I may feel out of place in this world, I also feel tied to it. My heart bucks against visions of heaven that are stripped of everything I love about this planet – rainy days and thunder, wolves and whales, laughter and storytelling and human touch, spaghetti and pizza (not the pineapple kind of pizza, of course – that abomination is destined for the other place). If you’re like me, you find your soul asking: Is this world just a bad rough draft, a mess to be crumpled up and discarded? If so, what the heck was the point?
So back to the question that Colony House is posing: Which one is it? Is this world our home, or isn’t it? The closing lines of the song begin by restating the singer’s feeling of distance and exile:
Where I’m from
I’ve stood outside these gates before
Trying to listen
And hear a voice
Then, the singer offers us an answer:
I can hear it in the middle of the rain
I can feel it when my heart starts to break
I was born to desire
Where I’m from
Did you catch it? For the singer, home isn’t just a place where he lives, or even just a place that he desires. It’s both. For Colony House, and for followers of Jesus Christ around the world, the answer to the question of whether we belong in this world or not is “Yes.”
We were made to inhabit this earth. There’s a reason why we explore the edges of the maps, why we scribble songs and poems about the mountains, why we huddle together over coffee and donuts (and even pineapple pizza – thankfully, there is grace for our sins). This planet is our home. When God fashioned the earth, he called it “good.” It wasn’t a rough draft, as if God needed any practice; it was a finished work, made with a flourish, imbued with the Creator’s delight. If we deny this truth and view the world as a cage to be escaped from, we’re missing what God hand-crafted for our joy. This is our Father’s world, and we were made to run wild in it.
And yet, in another sense, we’re strangers in this world. Our planet is deeply broken, ravaged by thousands of years of war, greed, and environmental degradation. We may look for someone to blame, but we all know in our bones that evil and brokenness reside in our own hearts. The world’s a mess, and we are too. Nothing is untouched by the fallout from the Fall. The apostle Peter put it this way: “Dear friends, I urge you, as sojourners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul” (1 Peter 2:11). Exiles and sojourners are not at home. They feel the pain of distance from their native land. Likewise, those who follow Christ can’t be content to merely bide their time on this planet, to accept the way things are, or to follow the course that society is taking. Those who follow Christ are both wanderers and revolutionaries, just as their Savior was. They can never be truly at home in this world, but they’re also fighting tooth and nail for its redemption.
This world in its deep brokenness is not our home. And yet, incredibly, in the final analysis and at the end of time, this world is our home. The apostle John’s vision at the end of Revelation doesn’t describe an airy, ethereal paradise. It describes a re-created earth – a planet full of the same things that make life on this planet something to be wondered at. It describes the healing and restoration of our physical bodies, not separation from them (Romans 8:11). It describes a renovation of the existing structure, a lost home recovered, a return to a land that we’ve missed for a long, long time. It describes a new creation: “But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13).
This is our hope. This is the promise that Colony House echoes so beautifully in their song. If we take their artwork as an end in itself, as cool sounds and cooler lyrics, we miss its beating heart. It is, after all, a signpost pointing beyond itself to a distant land, and a call to join in the journey towards that destination. It’s an invitation to come home.
Words for Wayfarers 