C.S. Lewis’s “Coming Home” Letter (June 7, 1959)

On June 7, 1959, C.S. Lewis wrote to his American correspondent, Mary Willis Shelburne, a woman who carried long seasons of illness and hardship with quiet endurance. In a brief line filled with steady comfort, Lewis asked, “If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a ‘wandering to find home,’ why should we not look forward to the arrival?” The sentence gathers up an old Christian conviction: believers are travelers, not owners; stewards, not settlers.

Lewis wrote from England, where the memory of war, loss, and rationed years still lingered in many homes. His pastoral counsel did not deny grief or minimize duty. Instead, it trained the heart to see death for the Christian not as abandonment, but as arrival—an entrance into the Father’s presence through the finished work of Christ. That hope does not make earthly responsibilities meaningless; it makes them purposeful. Work, friendships, prayer, and service become offerings made along the road.

Shelburne’s correspondence with Lewis shows how private letters can become public gifts. The heroism here is not the noisy kind. It is the courage to keep trusting God while the body weakens, to keep loving people when life feels narrow, and to keep praying when answers seem slow. Lewis’s line calls such endurance what it truly is: faith that walks forward, even when it limps.

Scripture speaks with the same pilgrim clarity. “But our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20). And again: “For here we do not have a permanent city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14). This hope steadies the believer in suffering, restrains fear, and strengthens obedience.

Lewis’s counsel is bracing and gentle: hold today’s tasks with gratitude, repent quickly, forgive freely, and do the next good thing with courage. Yet fix the deepest longing on the true homeland. For the Christian, “arrival” is not an escape from God’s world, but the long-promised meeting with the Lord who has prepared a place—and who brings His pilgrims safely home.