Future Nostalgia.

I moved around a lot growing up.  My dad wasn’t in the army or anything, but, from birth to eighteen, I think I lived in eight different communities.  Every time we moved, I genuinely thought about just not investing in our new home.  I wouldn’t make friends.  I wouldn’t get involved in the community.  In short, I wouldn’t care.

It never worked.  It turns out that’s just not in my nature.  So I made friends.  Good friends.  Great friends, even.  And then we’d move again.

Over time, the wounds of losing friends to distance have closed up.  Every time I move, I find new friends and a new community to invest in.  But every once in a while, a song will pop up on my iTunes or I’ll catch a whiff of some unique scent.  Maybe I’ll just randomly get in the right mood.  Either way, I start missing the life and friends I’d had before.  I remember all the good times and think about the memories we never got the chance to make. 

Future nostalgia is kind of like that, except I know I haven’t felt it yet.  Many of my friends know exactly what I mean when I say that, but let me explain a bit.

It’s the feeling I get when I walk through Heritage Hill in the fall.  I see myself there, in the future, raking leaves with my children as my wife heads inside to warm up some cider.  I love her.  I love my kids.  We have a good life that we’ve worked hard to make and we thank God that he’s provided it for us.

It happens in late spring and early summer.  My wife and I and some friends stay up late, telling stories and laughing on the back patio.  Icicle lights, or maybe Japanese lanterns, provide just enough light for us to see each other as we listen to the commotion of our teenagers fighting for the remote inside.  Our friend’s ten year old boy comes out.  He’s tired and doesn’t fit in with the rest, so he sits next to his mom and listens to us adults tell stories and discuss issues until he falls asleep in the warm air.

It’s the feeling I get around Christmas when I spend time with friends and family.  Inevitably, with all the moving I’ve done in my life, not everyone I want to be there is there.  But I look toward the future.  Toward a day, probably not even in this life, when all my friends are gathered around together.  A record of classic Christmas songs plays in another room while most of us are squeezed onto couches and spare chairs around a fire.  Maybe we’re playing some kind of board game.  Maybe future-Kemp is so boring that we’re playing charades or something.  Either way, there is a palpable feeling of comfort, of community, of love and peace and rest.

Though I know it will be a long time before I have these “dolly out” moments, I experience this feeling of future nostalgia with some regularity.  I suspect you do, too.  It’s part of our nature to long for healing, completion, and comfort.  I think that this feeling is even a gift from God.  It gives us something to shoot for.  An instinctive goal or state of being that we want to achieve some day.

The good thing about following the God I serve is that I believe that, someday, these moments will happen.  After sin has been destroyed and a new earth is created where we will live as we were meant to live, we’ll be able to purely enjoy these moments without fear of interruption.  There will be no goodbyes or I’ll-probably-never-see-you-agains.  When I get there, the first thing I’m going to do is gather my friends – all of them – and introduce them to each other.