Home Matters, Part I

Over two years ago, the lovely team at Daughters of Promise asked me to write a thoughtful, theological article on home. It was to explore this question: “Why does home matter in the bigger context of God’s story?” It was a new idea to me, but I quickly got excited as I began to study and ask questions about home. Since then, it has become something I think about often and take notes about and dream of expanding this article to something significantly more substantial. For example, what is special or significant about women in their ability to reflect God’s character as homemaker? And how does mundane, unseen work become meaningful when we think of ourselves as co-creators with God who is in the business of making all things new–pushing back entropy? So many rich questions to untangle! But that will be the work of another several years. For now, here’s the original (slightly polished) article, coming in two parts.

Is home a person, feeling, or place?

As a third-culture kid who feels at home in multiple states and countries, I have wrestled with this conflicted question for years.

If I don’t have a home, does it matter?

Is something important missing from my personhood?

Does God care about home since my homes have been so interchangeable?

I walk in a refugee camp in Greece and saw tents and blankets for houses. Under news headlines, I see photos of tent cities sprout up in Syria after another earthquake. I have suffered nothing like these beautiful people have, but I know the search for home. I’ve wondered if it should matter so much to me, and if home even matters to God because there are a great deal of other big questions that need His attention.

But when I observe people, listen to their stories, read literature, study the Bible, and cringe when people ask me where I’m from, it’s clear: home matters.

The immense disruption, disorientation, and restlessness over the loss of home shows me that home is important, does matter, isn’t a question to hush and try to forget.

Home can be a person or a feeling. But seeing God’s heart in the Biblical stories of Genesis to Revelation, it seems clear that God cares enormously about home as a place.

People and feelings do matter to God, because He says much about how to love Him and our neighbors. But He also holds place as very important, which gives us a way to think about our homes as places that matter to God.

In spiritual matters of the heart, we tend to live in our heads and work hard to think kind and gentle thoughts and nurture loving and patient attitudes. But in physicality, in places, our thoughts become embodied and visible.

For this and many other reasons that I’m still exploring, matter matters.

Bodies matter.

Places matter.

Home matters because God cares about physicality, clay, dust, tangible pieces of His creation. The incarnation of Jesus proves that, in case we doubt whether God values physicality. Jesus’ body, His dusty life as He touched people and got hungry and tired, elevates for us the gritty reality of matter, stuff, tangible pieces of living.

Once when I was reading John 14, I actually gasped when I read verse 23: “We will come to him and make Our home with him.” Jesus is talking about Himself and His Father, and He’s saying they are homemakers!

What kind of home do they make? How do they work together? What does their home look? They’re making their home in me? What does that even mean?

God’s homemaking in me is a spiritual reality with profound significance that ripples into physical reality even when I’m not conscious of it. Further, when I know something about His character and get to know Him as a homemaking person, I can grow in reflecting that part of His character.

Like elegant bookends, the special, prepared places in Genesis and Revelation show us what God thinks about home. And in between those places, we see many ways and times where God valued home as a physical place. He asked Mary to give a home to His Son Jesus, and placed that home first in her womb, then in Nazareth, specific places at specific times. God ends the Biblical timeline with a picture of our eternal home, a place too wondrous to describe, but we know it includes a wedding feast (I think there will be lots of cake!), cultural diversity, a river, and a fruitful tree. All these scenes happen in specific places, not just in our heads.

As I study the Bible and get to know God’s heart, I see His homemaking reveals many things about His character and here are just two:

He creates order and safety
He welcomes the stranger

This concept gives me goosebumps because these characteristics are beautiful and actionable for all of us!

Creating order and safety

God’s design of home holds an atmosphere of safety, rest, and belonging, seen both in Eden and our eternal home. God crafted them as places for fulfillment and fellowship where humans and nature can flourish and expand to their fullest capacity.

Home is a nest that protects fledglings from storms and predators. Home is a fuzzy blanket that wraps children in warmth and keeps out the world’s cold, hard edges. Home is the inviting smell of gingerbread baking. Its physicality engages all our senses and grounds us in this place, right now. Its daily, weekly, annual rhythms shape our neural pathways and linger in our subconscious.

In the absence of safety (wars, famine, abuse, neglect) humans tend to become less-than-ideal versions of who they were intended to be. The loss of home as a place is one reason refugees and natural disaster victims turn to violence and become people they would otherwise not be. In addition to suffering from emotional and spiritual damage, their material losses devastate their lives profoundly because physicality matters. No one just lives in their head.

But in safety and belonging in physical spaces, we flourish because that’s how God designed us. It’s the kind of homemaker He is.

From ages 35 to 41, I lived in five places. In each place, I arranged furniture, organized a kitchen with a housemate, and found a rhythm of keeping order that worked for that season of life. Then I walked away from it, left the stuff behind me (except for a mug or two), and started over in the next place. By the fifth place and the third country in six years, I wanted to think that home and belonging didn’t matter because it was too hard to reckon with all the loss and change I was living in.

But I’ve come to see that those transitions were so shaping and impactful to me precisely because home is so important. I couldn’t brush off the loss of home as if it didn’t matter.

The longing for home and belonging is an ache as deep as time. The loss of home is probably one reason Cain cried when he realized would never belong anywhere and would live in a place that means “wanderer.” We were made for home as a place that provides context for the connections in relationships that make us better people. Even literature knows this. Think about your favorite stories and books and how they center around the search for home and belonging.

The Odessey
Anne of Green Gables
Hannah Coulter
Gilead
News of the World

To be clear: home is not the most defining thing about us, but it IS basic to the need of our flourishing. This need doesn’t require us to live in one place all our lives. But creating home as a safe place to thrive means we can order our present spaces in ways that are restful and calming wherever we are.

When God gave humans dominion over creation, He was letting us be homemakers, designers of places. He was setting us free to innovate, create, and bring order out of the chaos that cascaded out of the fall. He could have regimented every part of keeping the first home, but He didn’t want Adam and Eve to be robots. Every healthy person carries some capacity to create, experiment, and maintain (“dress and keep”) home. As we carry out that work, we become better people ourselves and provide a comfortable, organized environment for others to flourish.

Up next Friday: Home Matters Part II, Creating Welcome for the Stranger