When Your Home is Not Your Own

A home is created when a living space is cultivated and cared for, treated with grace.

And these places of peace are also often where people come together, where comfortable conversations happen, where stories seem to gather–

walk around and notice photos from here or books from there or special keepsakes that hold an entire world inside them.

And we come to realize that our homes are not our own, but the gathering place of all the life that we’ve seen and all the people we’ve spent it with.

Above my kitchen sink, there are two pieces hanging:

one is a small picture from my mother,

and the other, a cross given to me by my former pastor and dear friend Julie.

And at my bedside table, a gift from Ashley and a globe from Meg that states, “Don’t be like the rest of them, darling.”

That’s my favorite.

In the boys’ room hangs a giant canvas of artwork from each of their showers, written prayers that rest over them as they play.

There are books from Christmas gift exchanges;

coffee mugs from our favorite trips;

a little brown clay pot made by my friend Matt in high school, and I still can’t figure out how I ended up with it all these years later.

Do you feel it now?

How this cacophony of memories brings community constantly to us?

And in someone else’s home sits something you made, bought, gifted with care, and it tells them a story every time they see it.

Let the weight of what you’ve been given settle in.

You are not alone, and if you look around, the evidence speaks.

Our homes are collections of life’s memories– some lost and replaced by something new, some as old  as the first day it was placed on the mantel.

Let home be a memorial, a sacred place where histories come together to mingle

and thrive.

Let home tell your story back to you,

and take those stories with you into every other home,

into every other relationship so that

Kingdom comes

and keeps coming

through these little things

that surround us daily.

Amen.