Hey, well, Merry Christmas, Fresh Life.

We're so glad you're here.

Every campus, church online, thanks for being here.

Merry Christmas to each of you.

We invite you back starting up this new message series in the new year.

But right now, let's grab our Bibles and turn to Psalm 84.

As you're turning there, I'm going to ask, what's the most homesick you've ever felt?

What's the most just, you know,

just homesick, that bittersweet longing you feel, which can get turned up in the holidays like no other time of the year. I think about how I took one semester abroad when I was in Bible

college, went to York, England, moved there in August of 2001.

And so, of course, just a month into living overseas in a different country for the first time

where I knew nobody, the world's at war, 9-11 happened, you could not get home.

And that feeling I had just flown through New York to get there in that sense of like,

I can't get home, the world's at war, where's this all going? And then Thanksgiving came pretty quickly thereafter. And so I just remember feeling like, oh my gosh, I'm a million miles away from where I want to be. All of my flatmates had taken excursions or gone back to their home. And so I had nothing to do.

So I was just literally sitting in the flat alone.

I got my calling card out from MCI WorldCom and dialed home, you know, with the calling

cards, right?

And then after those few minutes of talking, it was like, no, just leave me on the phone

while you guys cut the turkey, right?

It was just that sense of like, man, I just, I was homesick. And I ate a cup of noodles for dinner. I mean, it was, I didn't, I was without the tools to survive properly. And,

and we all can relate to that. And believe it or not, that's exactly what's on the psalmist's mind here

in what Charles Virgin calls the pearl of the Psalms. Only it's not homesickness for a country or a place

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