Hey! Welcome to the Just Ask Your Mom Podcast. I’m Renee Sproles, and I’m Bonnie Blayock.
Well, this is part 6 in our series on home and homemaking. And today we are going to talk about losing your home.
In our last episode, we noted that all homes, even a Christian home, are temporary. We don’t store up our treasures HERE. We store up treasures in heaven. We know in our heads that we can’t take our homes with us. So why do we feel the loss of a home so dramatically? Whether it’s your childhood home that your parents are selling, or the first home you and your husband purchased or a house fire, flood, natural disaster, foreclosure…. Losing a home is not only hard, it can be one of life’s unexpected tragic events. It resonates with something deep inside us. Our homes are filled with all our special memories: the bowl from Grandma, the photo of your first date, the blanket your aunt knit, and that stuffed animal from when you were a baby… And some of those things just aren’t replaceable, insurance policy or not.
Today, we’re happy to have TIFFANY WAX MANGUS with us to talk about her experience of losing a home. Tiffany and her husband, Brannon, lost their home back in 2015. And she has graciously agreed to share that experience and what their family learned in the process.
Welcome, Tiffany!
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? (Husband, kids, job, and whatever else you’d like to add)
Marshall Seagal at Desiring God wrote: The God who made the world, and everything in it, as Paul preached at Mars Hill, “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:26–27).
God not only knit you together in your mother’s womb; he also [determined] all the places you would call home — the periods and boundaries of your “dwelling place.” You do not have a home by accident. Your home is an invitation from God to seek God, and a commission from God to help others seek God. https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/god-chose-this-home-for-you
Can you tell us what happened that morning in November 2015?
Can you walk us through the “what’s next” after the fire is out but you have lost all your stuff? Contact your insurance company… find a place to live… buy clothes?
Scott Hubbard wrote: Often in suffering, we have eyes only for what our trials take away from us. We watch, speechless, as the fire swallows up so much we held dear. But underneath the ashes, our trials are producing something. “Testing . . . produces steadfastness.” If we will trust God and wait patiently, our trials will give us far more than they take away.
If you think back to high school, where we learned about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the very bottom tier—the most basic and critical needs–includes food, water, SHELTER. It’s wired into our survival psyche. One of the first things they do on shows like Survivor, in fact, is to build a shelter.
Maybe part of what draws news reporters to stories like yours (or the natural disaster) is this kind of self-reassurance/survival thing: glad that’s not me. Or, it starts the chain of questions….what if that had been me/us? What would we do? What would we try to save?
What were some unexpected gifts from God through your family’s suffering?
What were some of the most helpful acts of kindness or words of encouragement you received?
As a kid, my family had to evacuate once from a hurricane. I remember stacking some of the better furniture up higher and staying in a hotel inland in Orlando. Although I’m SURE my parents must’ve been stressed about it, I remember thinking about it as a kind of adventure. I had my 3-4 most favorite objects and that’s all I needed. (Thus the thinking of a child.)… We did have some time to prepare & process beforehand rather than a sudden unexpected event. (My parents carried that worry & the thoughts of “what could happen” for us.)
How did you help your boys process such a traumatic event? In what ways did they react differently from you? In a large sense, for children, YOU’RE their stability and “home” and place/stuff doesn’t register for them at the same level as it might for adults. (This, btw, is likely one reason divorce hits children doubly hard.)
I always like to say that before you know if something is working, you need to know what it’s for. What would you say our homes are for?
Fire drills are a big part of being safe in school: They prepare you for what you need to do in case of a fire. We used to talk to the kids about what to do if the house caught fire: where to go, what two things would you grab, etc. Did you all ever think of doing that before your house fire? What would you recommend for families to do to be prepared in an emergency?
When you rebuilt your house, did you have a different perspective… about the value of a home? Our stuff? (And did you change anything… like a bigger closet or different door etc?)
What would you say the hardest loss was in your situation? Dealing with insurance and living in a less-than-ideal situation for a while? The loss of a particular item? A feeling of displacement? Or maybe on a deeper level, grasping how tenuous our “security” and “stuff” really is–no matter how hurricane-proof or fire-proof we try to make it?
What did you, Brannon, and the boys take away from this experience?
Conclusion
The loss of a home can be traumatic–the safety it offers, our treasured items inside. Obviously some things we can’t control & it’s maybe a healthy mental exercise to think about what we might do if we experienced what Tiffany did. Consider how temporary our homes might actually be & what we should put our security in.
Jesus tells the parable,
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” (Matthew 7:24–27)
Marshall Segal again: If you’ve been living on sand, start pouring God’s word into the foundation underneath you and your family. As strong and secure as most modern homes may seem, many of them are quietly crumbling from the inside out because we’ve neglected the words of and about Jesus in Scripture. We subtly (or overtly) build homes on comfort, privacy, entertainment, and safety, without making room for God himself to speak. Then when the rains of various trials fall, or the floods of crises come, or the winds of life beat against us, the once strong house suddenly falls apart.