House?? Home??

It’s one thing to have a place to live. It’s quite another to call that place “home”. As of now, we have a place to live, but it’s not quite yet home. Many of the old familiar things that make a house a home, we no longer have because we’ve given them away or sold them when we moved to the children’s home. Some of the things we still have are yet in boxes, so we can’t see them or use them.
The house we moved to came with appliances, and we’ve bought new furniture for the living room and family room. We also bought a new bed mattress and box springs. So a lot of what we see when we’re there is new and is taking some getting-used-to.
However, a home is more than just familiar furniture. A home is an attitude…a mindset and a way of thinking. .One can live in the same house for thirty years and it never becomes home. Still another can live in a house for but a few days and immediately begin to feel the hominess of the place and see the concept of home growing and attaching itself.
As my wife and I continue to empty boxes, throw away trash and arrange furniture, we also put our marks on the place that was (and still is) a house and begin to make it a home. In a way, doing that is more work and takes more energy than just moving and unpacking. Where the move is physical labor, making a house a home exacts an emotional price that can’t be measured in dollars.
There comes a time when, if there are too many moves and the payment of the emotional price that comes with establishing yet another home, we become reluctant to invest any more of that capital into the task. We are content to live in a house for a time and not do what is required to make it a home. We are fearful that we will have to uproot yet again and do it all over, so why expend the energy?
I fear that my wife and I are becoming like that…moving so much that we are reluctant to put down roots. I know I am reluctant to do that. Maybe that’s why, as I’ve said before in this blog, I long for the day when I’ll have a home that I’ll never have to leave…where there will never be any cause for eviction. This life is too uncertain to bank on it here. I’m looking to the next life and the home that is promised to the children of Yahweh. I long for that stability.