Longing for Home

Longing for Home: Reflections of a Soul in Exile is a collection of essays exploring the experience of spiritual exile in a disoriented age. Blending personal reflection, historical memory, cultural critique, and theological insight, it examines what it means to feel like a stranger among one’s own people.

Drawing deeply from Scripture—especially the psalms, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk—the work frames exile not merely as loss but as revelation. In the collapse of familiar certainties, illusions are exposed, idols are unmasked, and a more honest faith begins to emerge. The essays wrestle with themes of truth and illusion, power and witness, grief and hope, confronting the ways faith can be distorted by ideology, nationalism, and the pursuit of control.

Yet this is not a work of despair. Through lament, memory, and prophetic truth-telling, the book points toward a resilient hope—refusing triumphalism while clinging to the enduring presence and faithfulness of God. In the strange land of exile, people may rediscover not only who they are but where God is to be found: not in the centers of power but among the humble, the grieving, and the faithful.

Jeff Roper is Global Associate Director for the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Europe with Foursquare Missions International. His work centers on developing disciple-making movements, training leaders, strengthening national churches, and cultivating mission partnerships. He is the author of Following Wisdom, Leading Wisely: Proverbs as Ancient Wisdom for Today's Leader and To the Ends of the Earth: Romans and the Mission of God. Jeff and Debbie have six children, thirteen grandchildren, and a dog named Millie.