“I’ll be home for Christmas.”
There’s a hush to those words, isn’t there? They hold a gentle ache, a tender longing. Every December, when papers are graded, the last emails are sent, and the house finally falls quiet, we hear it again and again — ‘Are you going home for Christmas?‘
That question is so simple.
And yet it opens a door into a deeper hunger inside us.
A hunger for a home where we belong.
A home that feels safe and warm.
A home where we can breathe, be ourselves, and know we’re loved.
That was what George Buttrick, a 20th-century preacher, was stirring when he spoke one Christmas morning.
He’d overheard church members greeting one another with that familiar question — ‘Are you going home for Christmas?‘ — and something stirred in him.
When he preached, he spoke the word home as if it were a prayer.
And it is.
Is home a house or a street?
Is it a dinner table crowded with laughter?
Or is home something deeper —
a longing we carry like a hidden song?
Buttrick dared to say that the truest home began in the most unlikely of places —
in a stable, under a star.
That tiny stable in Bethlehem was not grand or comfortable.
Yet it was home, because God chose to dwell there.
And John the Evangelist paints this so clearly:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.”
Before there was time, before there was breath,
the Son of God was home — home with God — forever.
And then — miracle of all miracles —
the Word became flesh.
That eternal Word left the safety of that perfect home,
stepping into our fragile world.
He took on human hands and a human heartbeat.
He moved into our neighborhood.
He made this aching world His home.
And when Jesus was cradled in that stable,
the light of heaven shone through his tiny eyes —
the light of home,
the light of God with us.
That is the wonder of Christmas.
He came to dwell in this imperfect world so that we might come home forever.
And so that our hearts might become a dwelling place for God Himself.
When we welcome the Christ-Child —
when we say yes to the Love that crossed eternity —
we, too, come home.
And that is my prayer for you this Christmas:
That you’d remember there is a home that will never leave you.
That you’d feel the gentle tug of it in your soul —
the place where God waits to embrace you.
This year, as you look up at the Christmas star or light a candle against the dark, let yourself say it too — “I’ll be home for Christmas.”
And then come home to the One who has come home to you.
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Keith Anderson, D.Min., is a Faculty Associate for Spirituality and Vocation at VantagePoint3 and President Emeritus of Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. He is the author of several books, including his most recent: On Holy Ground: Your Story of Identity, Belonging and Sacred Purpose (Wipf & Stock, 2024). His other works include Reading Your Life’s Story (IVP, 2016), A Spirituality of Listening (IVP, 2016), and Spiritual Mentoring (IVP, 1999). In his writing, teaching, and mentoring, Keith seeks to set a table for people looking to enter the “amazing inner sanctuary of the soul” in the most ordinary and extraordinary moments of life.