Perhaps the strangest part of re-entry is the way that our physical surroundings look the same as they did in 2019, but nothing feels quite the same. It’s like driving by your childhood home and seeing that they’ve repainted or changed out the front door. The scaffolding where we hung our day-to-day lives still stands. But no matter how hard we try, we can’t make it feel normal in the way it once did.
Hannah Anderson explores this phenomenon in her recent article “We Put Down Roots. Then Everything Around Us Shifted.”
“Sentimentality is the particular temptation of those of us who long for place,” she writes, “and we must guard against it. If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that the desire to live in a land of our imagining can change the course of history.”
Anderson reminds us that rootedness in a place is a good, even desirable, thing. But it cannot be the hook upon which we hang our security. Only a Person can do that—the One who invites the weary and heavy-laden to find their home in him.
