Last week, this post gave the first part of this article on “home.” It introduced the idea that God cares that home creates comfort and safety. One day in chapel this week, we read Psalm 27 and my brain starting pinging when I saw all these words about God’s home: house, temple, dwelling, tabernacle. This concept must be important to God. I wonder how that should inform how we live, how we see the church and individuals?

Creating welcome for the stranger

In addition to creating comfort and safety, God designed the home to create welcome for the stranger.

The picture of Revelation’s wedding feast shows us a place of welcome, generosity, and abundance. As we reflect God’s character of housekeeping, we can offer His warmth and welcome by embodying hospitality in our physical places. This can reach beyond walls, doors, and a roof.

In Free to be Single, her excellent book now out of print, Elva MacAlister points out that even when I walk across a college campus and fall in step beside a friend, I can welcome them into my space, my personal bubble, and show them hospitality as we walk together. Our personhood, the space we take up on a sidewalk or a car or a park bench, can be a place where we embody welcome, care, and interest in this person at this place and at this time.

God’s spaces reflect His selflessness, His intention toward people, and His deep care for us. We are most like God when we focus on others instead of our default selfishness. This is the biggest part of being hospitable.

Creating our spaces in pressure to compete with the latest influencer or neighbor will drain us instead of help us thrive. On the other hand, creating home as a place to welcome the stranger, which is really anyone, frees us to express our individuality in ways that help our people feel at ease, loved, and refreshed. One homemaker will prioritize plants and toys while another puts her energy into minimalism or coffee, but each can be responding to God’s direction to create order and welcome the stranger.

Home looks different for all of us, depending on our ages, seasons of life, and native abilities. But Christians can always reflect God’s homemaking skills in ways that make order out of chaos and offer life and beauty to people.

Trinity is an old painting by the Russian artist Rublev that moves me deeply. Showing us a peek into God’s character, the medieval painting depicts themes of fellowship, unity, order, and hospitality. Three angels sit around a table at Mamre, while Abram, childless and out of sight, prepares a feast for them. The angels represent the Trinity, a unit of perfect love, fellowship, and safety. They graciously accept Abram’s eager hospitality. Abram, is, after all, reflecting God’s generosity and care, demonstrating what He knows about God’s character.

As homemakers made in God’s beautiful image, we extend, arrange, offer safety, and create homes because we first receive it from God’s heart. Rublev’s Trinity shows how home, fellowship, and hospitality comes full circle: we receive and offer in response, we give out of what God gives us, and we can never out-give God!

Is home a person, feeling, or place?

When I look at the glad fellowship of the Trinity and see how Jesus showed us the Father’s face in a particular time and place in history and geography, my love deepens for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and I discover my true home. In the Trinity’s circle of beauty and truth, home is a person, a feeling, and a place. Because I’m in a body and not only a soul, I learn from God that place, stuff, food, furniture, things I touch, all matters because it matters to Him.

In the trailer we rent, our shared space isn’t trendy or influencer-worthy, but my housemate and I try hard to blend our differing color preferences, use indirect lighting, white walls, original art, and plenty of blankets within reach to make a comfortable space for ourselves and our guests. I like to put tea and scones on the battered coffee table so that people don’t have to move far for it, and they can prop up their feet wherever they’re comfortable. Friends often step from the porch to the living room and sigh “Oh, this looks so warm and cozy” which is exactly what we want them to feel!

Does home matter to God?

God cares deeply about home as a place of safety and welcome.

In a world that’s constantly degenerating into entropy and disorder, God’s people have a high responsibility to bring beauty, order, and welcome wherever we can. Women (and some men!) are especially good at this, regardless of their personalities or Enneagram numbers.

 Of all the careers you’ve dreamed of, imagine reflecting God’s character of being a home-maker!

I wrote a book about living well in a place I hadn’t planned to be. Turns out that’s where a lot of us find ourselves. You too? Order your copy here!