For three straight years, summer camp provided the best and worst of times of my childhood.

I loved almost everything about summer camps. A week with my friends in cabins and competitions and the all-you-can-eat cafeteria food was incredible!

At the same time, I have vivid memories of intolerable sadness. For some reason when I was 10, 11 and 12, I got severely homesick while at summer camp. If there was enough time for me to sit and think, then there was enough time for me to think about home and how I wished I was there. I couldn’t go to sleep at night without crying (which is extra miserable when you’re in a cabin filled with boys who hear every sniffle). My heart would break over a plate of tater tots because I would think that there was food at my house, too. I teared up while hiking on the trails because in my mind I was walking farther and farther away from home. The one thing that helped me make it through the week was knowing that I was going home on Saturday.  So, Thursday was better than Wednesday and Friday was better than Thursday and Friday didn’t contain many tears because I was going home the next day.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved camp, I just really wanted to go home. It’s not fun being homesick.

Christians speak of homesickness in a positive light because it’s like the homesickness on a Friday of summer camp. They can live in the homesickness because they know they’re “going home” soon. It’s living in the hopeful expectation of what’s next and that hope for the future gives us strength to push through whatever troubles are in the present.

Cornelius Plantinga Jr., in his book “Discerning The Spirits,” writes about how Christians bring their homesickness into their gatherings. He says, “In a fallen world, Christians are never entirely at ease. They’re always feeling a little displaced” and this is a feeling they collectively share.”

Justo Gonzalez, a Cuban-American historian and theologian, explains how this dimension of the believer’s life is felt among many Hispanics in the United States, and how it flavors their worship. From his perspective, Hispanics can feel acutely that they are neither fully Mexican or fully American, and that they live “at the hyphen” between them. They recognize what it feels like to be exiles from their homeland and foreigners in their new home.

In many ways, all Christians should work toward this idea of living “at the hyphen.” For those who don’t already know that reality, it can be tempting to function on only one side of the hyphen. Either caring less about what’s next or caring too little about the right now. Both extremes would benefit by moving toward the middle and work toward living at the hyphen. We should never feel so settled that we say, “Your Kingdom come … but not yet.” Nor should we solely desire our escape from this world.

Our times of worship in our gatherings should reflect that mentality. We are glorifying God in the present but rehearsing for what is to come. We long for that coming day by living in the most of this day. It’s living at the hyphen. It’s a longing for heaven on Earth and for God’s kingdom to be a present reality.

It’s the kind of homesickness you experience on Friday of summer camp. You can have a blast without being in a hurry because you know tomorrow holds what you have been longing for and tomorrow will come soon enough.