HOME. What does that word conjure in your imagination or memory?
Maybe you imagine the posters on your bedroom wall as a teenager (Duran Duran, e.g.,) or the creak in the hall stairs as you crept down on Christmas mornings. Maybe it’s the smell of cut grass on Saturdays in the summer or that one tree that you loved to climb.
Is home a place or a feeling? Perhaps it’s some of both. We were just talking the other day with some friends about whether we could remember our home phone number from when we were kids. (Back when each house only had ONE phone number and the phone hung on the wall in a central place.) It’s partly about the setting and partly about the memories and feelings that were created there.
The house we grew up in occupies sacred ground in our hearts. That’s true even if your home wasn’t particularly “happy” or if you experienced a lot of conflict there. It takes up space because it’s the place where relationships develop and where some of our biggest life events happen—especially as young kids.
As grown ups, it’s where we define ourselves. We use our homes to distinguish ourselves from others. Remember your first apartment when you left home? Or your first place as a newlywed? We wanted to make it our OWN even with hand me downs and stuff we’d find at yard sales— fun wall hangings, plants (or no plants), neutral or bright colors, a favorite chair.
Jennifer Roback Morse, in her book Love & Economics, says: Our home becomes an external reality that reflects our inner subjective lived experience. (You can see that if you ever watch the Hoarders show….)
We’d love it if every thought of home brought to mind love, contentment, warmth, and security, but of course we know that’s not the case. But are there some things we can practice, some elements of what makes a “home” that we can tease apart and maybe change (i.e., redecorate) if it’s not what we’d like it to be?
Welcome to the first of what we’re calling our “home series” on Just Ask Your Mom.
We’re fans of history & read quite a bit of historical fiction and non-fiction. Part of what draws me to these sorts of books is imagining what it must have been like to have built and maintained a home before Wayfair and Home Depot. Like the Little House on the Prairie books I devoured as a kid: How much partnership and determination it must have taken to build your own home log by log, grind grain for your daily bread, carry water from a spring or well, churn your butter & care for your livestock! It was WORK and a lot of it.
Today, all over the world–& between the 2 of us we’ve traveled quite a bit of it (India, South America, Africa, the middle East and Europe)—a roof over your head and a guarantee of daily bread aren’t a given. We do get that, but in this series—since our US experience is what we know—it’s what we’ll focus on.
In the US, the National Association of Real Estate Boards adopted the term Realtor in 1916. As the housing market boomed during the 1940s and 1950s, so did the real-estate profession. By 1950, for the first time in American history, more than half of all Americans owned their homes.
If you’re a middle-class American and homeowner, chances are, about two-thirds of your wealth is in your home equity. Homeownership has long been an effective way for Americans to improve financial standing and build a stable future. The path to homeownership for Black Americans has been somewhat more complicated than that. (Practice of red-lining was a regular thing in banking for decades…refusing a loan to someone in area of poor financial risk…many were caught in a catch 22 of trying to get ahead.)
But this series isn’t really about OWNING a home or growing your wealth. Whether you rent, live in public housing, or live like a nomad and work remotely in a series of locations, I think the core elements of a happy home remain the same.
We’re also not only talking about just the concept of shelter. Shelter is a basic human need, whether it’s a primitive cave, a pitched tent in the desert, or a carved space high on a cliff wall (like you see out West in NM). Drop Bear Grylls in the wilderness and it’s one of the first things he tries to find—a dry spot to huddle for the night.
So, what’s the purpose of the home? Is it just a place to lay your head at the end of a day and where you know the wifi password?
Renee is famous for insisting that before you know if something is working, you have to know what it’s FOR.
If we look back in time to the beginning of home, we don’t see a colonial brick two-story 3 BR, 2 bath on a quiet cul de sac. There’s no “home” in the architectural sense at all in Genesis. Home, for the first people on earth, was the whole open world and, more locally, a garden.
Their needs were met; they rested, explored, played, were creative. They communed with God there and grew to know one another. They were secure and safe. (In the ancient world, only kings lived in gardens. So, the original home for humanity was a shared palace, an oasis, a place of safety, security, comfort, and empowerment: to go out from that home to fill the world and bring order to it. Also, they had pets—and very little laundry to do. 😉
Then: the Fall. Creation breaks, boundaries are blurred. We’re outside the garden—homeless, in a sense. Now we must work to meet our basic needs. Rest must be measured. Children come and the number of relationships we must navigate multiplies. God sometimes seems far or less obviously present and we have to remember to remember Him. And now there’s laundry—(drat) because we’re wearing clothing.
Because we have a merciful Father whose heart always longs to bring us back to relationship, I wonder if this huge sense of “home” in our psyches has something to do with this. It’s our way of getting back to what we know in our hearts was meant to have been.
So we fashion a cabin or a tent or a niche inside a cave—trying to make for ourselves a likeness that pulls at something inside us. We NEED a place to take off our masks and be ourselves, a place to rest, a place of refuge and safety. We NEED a place to foster our creativity and a place we can make beautiful in some way uniquely ours. We NEED a place where relationships—the most important ones—can flourish and where love is given and received. We NEED a place that mirrors our eternal home to remind us of our purpose.
Couple of additional thoughts about worldview of home: When the apostle Paul writes to Timothy a couple of letters of instruction for how to teach, lead, and build a healthy church, he writes to both men and women about homemaking: According to Paul, managing his household, or “homemaking,” is a critical quality of every church elder (cf. 1 Tim. 3:5).
And just two chapters later, in what at first appears to be a “throwaway” line about widows in 1 Timothy 5:14, Paul writes: So I counsel younger widows to marry, to have children, to manage their homes and to give the enemy no opportunity for slander.
The phrase translated “manage their homes” is translated “keep house” in the New American Standard Bible and “guide the house” in the King James Version. It is actually the Greek word oikodespotein, which comes from two Greek words: oikos and despotes. Oikos means “house,” and you might be able to guess what despotes means based on a similar-sounding word in English: “despot.” Despotes means “lord” or “master” (although the word “despot” has come to suggest a tyrannical form of lordship). To clarify, let’s see how despotes is translated elsewhere in Scripture:
- Simeon, upon meeting the infant Jesus, declared, “Sovereign Lord [despota], as you have promised, you may now dismiss your servant in peace.” (Luke 2:19)
- When Peter and John were released from prison, the believers praised God in prayer, “Sovereign Lord [despota], you made the heavens and the earth. . . ” (Acts 4:24)
- In the letter we are now considering, 1 Timothy, Paul says, “All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters [despotas] worthy of full respect. . . those who have believing masters should not show them disrespect.” (1 Timothy 6:1)
- See also 2 Timothy 2:20–21, 1 Peter 2:18, 2 Peter 2:1, Jude 4, and Revelation 6:10, which also use “lord” and “master.”
Paul names the wife as the master of the home. Not the servant. Not even the manager. He calls her the “master.” Looking at the Bible as a cohesive, coherent whole, I see Paul’s description going hand-in-hand with Proverbs 31. Some of the healthiest marriages I know function with the wife being master of the home while the husband is the loving head of his wife. He listens to her intuition and wisdom and she respects his viewpoint.
In Proverbs, I see a woman who is the master of her home. I see a strong helper (ezer kenegdo) who is competent to run a household and a business while caring for her family and others. It turns the common phrase, “Behind every successful man, there’s a woman” on its head, because this successful woman has a husband who “has full confidence in her,” who gains respect “at the city gate” because of her, and who “praises her” (Proverbs 31:11, 23, 28).
I think our bodies represent this reality. In America we have come to believe that our physical bodies are subordinate to how we imagine ourselves. We often want to do any “what” with our bodies without giving heed to the “why” of our design. We, especially women, can come to believe that our bodies hinder our flourishing. We can even believe that our bodies lie to us. A Christian view of nature, however, sees our sexuality (male or female) not as a hindrance to our flourishing but as a clue to God’s design and purpose for us in the world he made
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of being a woman is the ability to carry and birth a child. No amount of gender transitioning will be able to allow men to do that. What is God telling us in this design of taking a man and a woman to make a baby that is implanted in our uterus? Our bodies are literally a “home” for 9 months for that little boy or girl who we will eventually bring to another home: the one we have made with dad.
When the apostle Paul says that women should be the “masters” or “lords” of their homes, I think he is stating the observable reality of creation.
If you’ve watched the TV show Alone, you’ll see this reality in another way. Alone is an American survival competition series on History. It follows the self-documented daily struggles of 10 individuals (seven paired teams in season 4) as they survive alone in the wilderness for as long as possible using a limited amount of survival equipment. With the exception of medical check-ins, the participants are isolated from each other and all other humans. They may “tap out” at any time, or be removed due to failing a medical check-in. The contestant who remains the longest wins.
Proverbs 14:1 states: “The wise woman builds her house.” The shelters made by men vs the shelters made by women have been interesting to see. Men are more focused on function and women seem to integrate form more often in conjunction with function.
From Outside magazine: You knew early on in season three—held in Patagonia, Argentina—that Callie North of Washington State had the creative gene. One of her first projects was to construct a reclining chair out of bamboo that would look at home in a Williams-Sonoma catalog. North spent several weeks building a shelter that still ranks as one of the best in the show’s nine seasons, with a rock hearth, bamboo walls, and plenty of accoutrements. When her motivation began to wane, North built a sauna to warm herself, complete with a cushy walkway to and from her shelter made from soft moss.