Author Spotlight: Amy Baik Lee

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 MA 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.

This Homeward Ache was published in 2023 and won an Award of Distinction from The Gospel Coalition for First-Time Author. The book is a beautiful offering for those looking for courage, companionship, and a stirring sense of the scope of our journey home to Christ.

An excerpt from Amy’s book:

A Yearning with a Destination

Nostalgia, homesickness, melancholy, the appreciation of beauty, and even escapism are part of the landscape of human experience, and they weave through it like streams, good for dipping one’s feet in for refreshment or remembrance, helpful for the occasional washing of wounds.

But they are each, by themselves, incomplete. Each stream has at one point or another drawn me further into the deeper waters of Sehnsucht (“the particular attitude which is characterized by a sense of separation from what is desired, a ceaseless longing which points always beyond.”). Other times, I’ve indulged the emotions behind them and wandered along the banks of each kind of desire, following watery offshoots until they trickle into nothingness and my sense of direction dries up. While stumbling back, I have observed that these smaller longings can act as tributaries leading to a greater river, but the greater river itself does not flow back into them.

Yet even the analogy of a river is inadequate, for the yearning that drew me out the door of familiarity is not a fixed and visitable location on my map. If anything, Sehnsucht is far more like a strong current running at the center of all these longings, or a glint of sea on the horizon, or an unexplained rush of wind in the close quarters of an upper room. Something calls, and some counterpart in me, rejoicing, wakes up.

There’s still a great deal of blank space in my cartographic understanding of this yearning, and there are certainly broader and finer ideas explored by others that I will never know in full. But just as dots and lines on a map begin to take on personal meaning, like a hilly tree-lined street here in Colorado that reminds me of the Virginia countryside, or the “H” sign marking the way to the hospital where my children were born, so too this invisible feature of Sehnsucht-Joy has taken on a special identity to me.

In the history told by the Scriptures that I’ve read since my prayer by the classroom window, the act of renaming has always signaled a paradigm shift: Sarai to Sarah, Luz to Bethel, Simon to Peter. And in a change much smaller but perhaps no less momentous, Sehnsucht has been christened anew for me as I look to my eventual arrival in that far-off country:

I live with a Homeward longing.