Ask anyone who has lived abroad long enough when they are going home, and you will usually get some version of the same answer. Soon come. Two more years. Once the last child finishes school. When the house is ready. It won’t be long.
People mean it. For many families in Birmingham, Brooklyn or Brampton, going back is a plan with a bank account attached. There is a lot in the parish, maybe a house with the ground floor finished, a cousin who checks on it, a folder of receipts. The plan is real. It is the date that keeps moving.
How “two more years” becomes twenty
Nobody decides to put off a return for two decades. It happens in small, reasonable steps. The job offers a promotion. A grandchild arrives. The pension will be better after a few more years. A parent back home dies, and some of the pull goes with them. Then the knees start complaining, and the hill up to the house becomes a worry instead of a pleasure.
Each step makes sense on its own. Taken together, they can leave a person living in two places and settled in neither. The flat in the cold city is treated as temporary, so it is never quite furnished properly. The house back home is treated as the real one, so the money goes there, yet nobody sleeps in it for eleven months of the year.
Consider a couple who have been building on the husband’s family land for fifteen years. Every summer they fly out, check the progress, pay the mason, argue with the hardware store and fly back. Their grown children have been in the house perhaps four times. The couple say “home” and mean the parish. They talk about the address where they have actually lived for thirty years as if it were a waiting room.
What the waiting costs
Some of the costs are financial. A house that stands empty needs security, maintenance and someone trustworthy to watch it. Roofs leak whether the owner is there or not, and termites do not wait for the retirement party. Money sent in bursts, a transfer here and a barrel there, is harder to keep track of than money you spend where you can see it.
Other costs are quieter. Friendships where you actually live get less attention because you are “not staying”. Church involvement stays shallow. Some people, without noticing, spend their healthiest years getting ready for a life they will be too tired to enjoy.
The people back home pay too. A relative who has been told for years that “it won’t be long” may have arranged their own life around the promised return: minding the property, keeping a room free, waiting to hand over responsibilities. Every time the date moves, their patience wears a little thinner.
Hold fast what you have
Near the end of the Bible there is a word of encouragement to a small, struggling church: “Behold, I am coming quickly! Hold fast what you have, that no one may take your crown” (Revelation 3:11). It is first of all about staying faithful to Christ while waiting for his return, and it should not be flattened into property advice. Still, it speaks to anyone who lives in a permanent state of “soon”. Hold fast what you have, and not only what you hope to have.
For the Christian, waiting for something good is never meant to empty the present of meaning. The believers in Philadelphia were waiting for the greatest homecoming of all, and they were still told to be faithful where they were. James makes a similar point more bluntly to people busy planning their next move: “Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that'” (James 4:15). Plans are fine. Taking the calendar for granted is not.
Living honestly in both places
None of this means giving up on the return. For many people it is a right and good desire, rooted in love for family, for land and for the place that formed them. The real question is whether the plan still serves the family, or the family now serves the plan. A few honest conversations can help.
- Put a real date on it, even a provisional one. “When I retire at sixty-six” is a plan. “Soon” is a mood.
- Ask what would actually have to be true for you to go: health, income, a finished house, a spouse who wants the same thing. Write it down together.
- Check that both of you still want to go. It is surprisingly common for one spouse to have quietly changed their mind and never said so.
- Talk to the grown children about what they expect, including what happens to the house if you never move into it.
- Look at the house back home as it is today: what it costs each year to keep, who looks after it, and whether it could be let, lived in by family or finished more simply.
- Decide how to live well where you are in the meantime: the church you attend, the neighbours you know, and a flat you can make comfortable without feeling guilty about it.
Some couples find that setting a date frees them. Others discover that home, for them, has quietly become wherever the grandchildren live, and that the house in the parish would be better passed to a nephew, rented out or sold. Neither outcome is a failure. What wears people down is the undecided middle, year after year.
The homecoming that does not move
Christians have always had two addresses of a kind. Hebrews describes the patriarchs as people who “confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13), looking for a better country. That longing is not something to be cured. But it did not stop Abraham pitching his tent, digging wells, and burying Sarah with care in a field he bought openly and paid for in full.
One homecoming will never slip down the calendar. Until then, the call is to hold fast what we have: the marriage, the friendships, the church, and yes, the house or the flat, whichever side of the ocean it stands on. If the return comes, may it come to people who lived fully while they waited. If it does not, may they have loved the place they were in.
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