PART 2 of HOME SERIES
What’s the first thing you take off when you get home? Your bra? Your shoes? How about your “on persona?” The person you are when you’re at work or your in-laws’…the chipper conversationalist you are with the drive-thru guy or the checker at the grocery store. Do you feel that “turn off” when you cross the threshold of your home?
There should be something about us that feels safe enough to “relax” into ourselves when we come home. Physically comfortable, yes: We can scrub our faces clean of makeup and wear our yoga pants. But also in some mental/emotional way. It should be SAFE to come home and take off our masks without worry.
The people in our home will have seen us at our best and worst. They will know us enough to know when we’ve had a bad day, when something seems “off,” or when we just “don’t seem like ourselves.” We don’t have to pretend because we’re worried we’ll be shamed or ridiculed or dismissed.
Does that mean all “outside” courtesies are off the table? Can we burp and fart and leave a trail of dishes and crumbs behind us? How do we reconcile the need to “rest” at home and still think of others while we’re there? This can be a real tension for some. “I don’t want a to-do list when I come home…I just want to watch football or read my book.”
If home isn’t a place of rest for everyone in the family, then it’s not accomplishing its purpose. God calls us first to love others, and in a marriage relationship—we’re offering mutual love and respect. So, yes, this might mean you give up 10 minutes to wash the family’s dishes or you share the load of work at home. (SEE OUR EPISODE ON FAIR PLAY—the book by Eve Rodsky).
Consider what REST might mean for those you live with. We’ve talked about temperaments on this podcast and refer to them often because to know your family well is to love them better. Remember that old show “The Odd Couple?” It’s been remade a few times but it makes the point here. A neat-freak and a total slob become roommates—and that’s the schtick of the whole show.
Maybe it doesn’t phase you to shove 2 weeks of laundry off the couch when you want to sit down. Or it’s not time to do the dishes until you run out of clean silverware. If there’s someone else in your home, though, who can’t focus with a cluttered desk or for whom the environment is important to their well-being, it doesn’t HONOR that person if you’re fine with them doing all the work. (“If it bothers you, you clean it” attitude.)
That doesn’t mean you have to swab the deck the moment you get home at the end of your busy day, but it does mean you should notice and contribute to the family’s functioning. Ultimately, it’s up to each family to negotiate and work out the duties in a way that honors everyone.
Is Anyone Home?
Consider your calendar and your schedule. Home as a place of rest doesn’t just mean sinking into bed at night. REST is more than getting 8 hours of sleep each night. REST also refers to leisure & relaxation.
You can certainly relax and have leisure time at the park or on a vacation, but how much time/week do you actually spend “resting” at home? Does the idea of resting like this make you anxious? Do you feel like you need to be constantly on the go or you get antsy?
This may be a function of being an extrovert or introvert. Spend enough time at home and an extrovert (one who gets energy from being around people/socializing) can get irritable. 2020 was REALLY hard on the homebound extrovert. Introverts, on the other hand, might tend to be “homebodies,” or someone who likes spending time at home rather than traveling or socializing.
Sometimes, however, this isn’t the issue. It’s that the pace of our world in the information age has wired us where we don’t know how to be bored or still. (It’s in the boring, still moments where God tends to get our attention and where creativity blossoms.)
With each subsequent child, we can easily get drawn into packing more and more into a given day. Making sure they’re “enriched”, entertained, and given all the opportunities for sports leagues, dance class, socializing (sleep overs), and on and on until it’s rare that we’re all together—bored and still– as a family at home.
Do you know what KIDS say are their most favorite memories of childhood? Sometimes it’s when they were sick at home and a parent cared for them. Often it’s the surprise snow day—when they get to stay home with no obligations. Winter break when school is out, lessons are cancelled, and family is at home.
YOU HAVE THE POWER AND THE CHOICE to determine your family’s rhythms. We let ourselves get pushed or swayed into ways of life that we then think are inevitable. Everything is always on the table. ANYTHING can always come OFF that table.
Are you home enough to rest there? Or are you home just long enough to fling backpacks in the corner and grab a snack before heading to the next thing and the next?
REFUGE
Refuge is a condition of being safe or sheltered from pursuit, danger, or trouble. Does this describe your home?
It might be useful to think about the opposite of safe. What do you feel when you’re unsafe? Fear & anxiety.
Are your children afraid and anxious at home? All of us—but children in particular—crave the security that mom & dad are ok. They need to see this demonstrated with affection, respect, kindness, and teamwork. If there are fractures between mom & dad, kids have a built-in survival radar to KNOW this whether you’re actively fighting in front of them or not.
Are harsh angry words commonplace? Do you and your spouse fight and insult one another? Are you sarcastic, unkind, disrespectful? OR is asking for forgiveness & making up in front of the kids a common practice? Do you sit beside one another on the couch, at church, or at a restaurant? (kids are concrete & need concrete visual demonstrations!)
Children also crave consistency. If you are all over the place with your mood, emotions, corrections, kids don’t know what’s expected or when they’re about to get in trouble. They never know what might set you off—which isn’t fair to them and actually won’t teach them well in the long run.
They also don’t KNOW that you’ve been holding your tongue and controlling your temper etc…for the first 10 times you’ve butted heads with them, so they very likely are shocked and scared when you blow up on the 11th time because for them it’s out of left field. So, maybe give them —or your spouse!—a head’s up that your patience is wearing thin.
So be fair—set the limits and enforce them. Let them know what consequences will be and then it’s their choice to cross the line and receive them. They’re not just gambling on whether you’ll enforce something or not based on your mood.
One last point on home being a refuge: it’s a shelter from PURSUIT or DANGER. What are you letting FOLLOW your children (or your spouse or yourself) home? What’s pursuing them? What package does that usually come in?
Leave work at work….have a transition time before you get home. Maybe a phone call with spouse or a moment in the driveway? Pray, listen to a great song, breathe. Transition.
For our kids—especially those with access to smart phone—anxiety has been linked (and self reported) to never being able to turn off the input. Periods of no electronics at dinner, or after a certain time in the evening, or before school… waiting until as late as possible to introduce…. All of this can be helpful to undo the addictive pull.
Have a dinner conversation this week with your family. Does our home feel restful to you? Does it feel safe? What’s something that would make it feel more so? What’s something that makes you feel safe or restful?
We’ll close out this episode with some thoughts from Jen Pollock Michel from The Gospel Coalition:
God was the world’s first homemaker. A careful reading of history bears out how much homemaking has changed in the last 350 years since the industrial revolution. Home has not always been the exclusive province of women. housework in pre-industrial America, as symbolized by the one-pot stewed over the fire, was a shared responsibility. The men trapped, shot, and butchered the animals; the women plucked the birds and cleaned the fish. Men grew the wheat; women grew the vegetables. Men cut and stacked the wood; women tended the fire. Men and boys carved the wooden trenchers and spoons; women and girls wiped them clean after the meal. Everyone took part in getting dinner on the table.
With industrialization, however, came dramatic shifts in the nature of work. Factories began to replace farms; home was less and less a shared space for women and men. New technologies, like the cookstove and the loom, allowed for domestic chores to be more than purely utilitarian tasks—and a new source of female pride. Even the nature of child-rearing responsibilities changed. While 17th- and 18th-century sermons in America had been primarily addressed to men, mothers (and the home) became revered in 19th-century sermons. As Henry Ward Beecher wrote at the time, the home becomes “the church of childhood, the table and hearth a holy rite.”
In what historians have referred to as “The Golden Age of Domesticity,” the home became the female sphere—and homemaking, “women’s work.” With these changes, our story of home shrinks.
A better-fitting story of home is this: God promises home to all of his people—married and unmarried, childless and child-full. Home, in God’s kingdom, doesn’t begin at the altar. In part, home is restored to all of God’s children because Christ has promised that “if anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23). We all have home because God, through the indwelling of his Spirit, makes it with us. In us. Moreover, home, as human community, is given to each of us through the belonging we’re meant to find in the church—“the household of God” (cf. 1 Tim. 3:15). In the church, we have new brothers and sisters, new mothers and fathers.
Best of all, home will be redeemed most fully for all of us when the New Jerusalem descends from heaven like a bride dressed on her wedding day. “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man” (Rev. 21:3). That’s a far bigger, better promise than marriage and minivans.