The Beach Boy’s “Let’s Me Go Home,” Clapton’s “Blind Faith,” Denver’s “Take Me Home Country Roads,” and countless other ballads sing about going home. These rock songs keenly capture the sense of longing through their message, while many other Gospel songs on the same topic refer entirely to death. I think anytime I feel like I am in a rut or even just having a bad day I get this sense of wanting to go back in time, to revert to a place that gives me more comfort than the the world, the environment I call my home today.
Some of the places we long for aren’t places. Some of them are times, and some of them never even existed. Will a spurned child ever have a mother who loves them? Probably not, but they still hope for one, and spend their whole lives wondering why she hated them; why they were never good enough. They will spend their whole life trying to find the gift of unconditional love; a package that never arrived. They bumble, and tumble and fail and fall until one day, if they are lucky, they might realize that the unconditional love they seek must come from within and can’t be gotten from another person. Not exactly what they wanted. It doesn’t replace the love they missed out on from their mother. No one ever gets over something like that.