Description

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The Gospel Coalition 2024 Book Awards, First-time Author, Award of Distinction

That sudden yearning you feel when you see a sunset. That pang of longing you sense deep in your bones when you attend a funeral or even gaze at a poignant piece of art. Those experiences that sting you to attention in moments of beauty, peace, or sorrow—the ones you can sense are offering you a twinkling, piercing hint of heaven:
 
Are these meant to do more than point you to eternity?
 
What if they could enable you to live more fully on the way there? 
 
Through personal reflections, evocative stories, and profound writing, author Amy Baik Lee offers This Homeward Ache, inviting you to remember the times you've been deeply moved by a glimpse, a spark, of something you know is beyond the visible present—moments that other cultures and times have called Sehnsucht, saudade, hiraeth, or galmang. In each spellbinding chapter, Amy traces her own brushes with this longing, unfolding her discovery that it is designed to enrich and alter every area of our lives: our valleys of pain, our relationships with other people, and ultimately our reception of the love of God.
 
If you’ve ever wondered how to keep going in this world while holding on to the hope of the world to come, This Homeward Ache offers you courage, companionship, and a stirring sense of the scope of our journey home to Christ.

About the Author

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Amy Baik Lee is a member artist of the Anselm Society Arts Guild and a contributing writer at The Rabbit Room and The Cultivating Project. A rapt recipient of stories, she holds an Master of Arts in English from the University of Virginia. She works at a desk overlooking a small cottage garden in Colorado, usually surrounded by her husband’s woodworking projects, her two daughters’ drawings, and music that inevitably influences the tone of her words.   

Praise For…

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“Following in the footsteps of many great Christian writers like C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and George McDonald, Amy Baik Lee leads us on an exploration of sehnsucht, that inner ache for beauty, goodness, and truth that leads us to and is a way of experiencing He who created them. This Homeward Ache is a mix of beautifully descriptive memoir, intellectual musing, and vulnerable lament. Many times while reading, I found myself reliving my own ‘divinely haunted’ and beauty-triggered memories of inexpressible and inexorable longing.”
—Steven Elmore, President of the C.S. Lewis Foundation

"If you've ever struggled to reconcile your deepest longings with the life you have to live right now, or the person you want to be with the one looking back at you in the mirror, you need to take this journey with Amy Baik Lee. She offers you her story with humility and wisdom, so that it might bring new life to your own."
—Brian Brown, Executive Director, The Anselm Society

“Amy Baik Lee gives voice to the unarticulated aches of every human across history. Filled with dazzling descriptions and framed by the deft narratives of a humble heart, This Homeward Ache traces humanity's deepest hunger to its source. This book is for anyone who yearns to understand the strange, extrinsic longings that stir in the deepest places of their hearts. I cannot recommend this exquisite work highly enough.”
—Christina Brown, Anselm Society Arts Guild Director, Writer for Cultivating Magazine

“With an exquisite expression of word-craft, author Amy Baik Lee offers her readers a revelation of both style and substance. She illuminates the elusive truth that each heart bears, the ‘inconsolable secret’ that C.S. Lewis wrote about in The Weight of Glory: the longing for Home. Weaving her own life story into the telling, Amy creates a written path Homeward, lit along the way with recognition and hope for each of us who ache with longing for the place we have not yet been but are made for like a hand and glove. I have read few books in my lifetime of equal beauty to This Homeward Ache and am immeasurably grateful that such a wonder is so kindly given to us.
—Lancia E. Smith, Publisher & Executive Director, Cultivating Oaks Press, LLC.