Where Love Begins
I remember the first couch my husband and I ever bought when we first got married. It was floral print, mauves and greens. It was our first attempt to create a home that was comfortable and uniquely ours. We were so proud of that couch and to have a space that we could call our own.
The couch was too big for our small first apartment, which ironically worked in our favor, since we didn’t have much else. We soon figured out that if we each turned the opposite direction facing each other on that couch, we had plenty of room to stretch out completely. We spent many nights up late watching movies and eating popcorn, heads turned sideways and body’s long, comfortable and content.
We were so young, determined to live the life we had both dreamed about, together as a couple, but we had no clue how to create that life. We struggled to recognize the value of having a place in this world filled with people who restore, encourage and mend the bruises of each day. Often, we did the opposite for each other, building a home of strife and compounding the world’s abuse.
It has been decades since that couch and that first apartment and we have learned that although we made an understandable attempt to create a home out of the type of furniture we owned or the house we lived in, we realize now that those things have little to do with the home we both truly desired to create.
You can have the most comfortable couch on the planet and still never learn to truly love the person that you share it with.
Home does not have the same meaning to all of us. Our stories are unique and our experiences are very different. Some look back fondly with warm hearts at their childhood and others hope to never look back again, afraid to stir up what’s better left alone.
Whatever our experience might have been, it doesn’t change the truth of what the home was meant to be and it doesn’t have to hamper us in our desire to create a home that we ourselves might have longed to experience.
When we recognize the power we have, especially as women, to write a story for our own family through the intentional tenderness in our own homes, the home can contain a sacred and redeeming quality that offers the next generation a better way to tell their own story.
For a family, the home was meant to be where love begins, the starting place of life. It was meant to be more than a shelter to house the temporal things we find in the world, it was meant to be a place of fruitfulness, a place where the activity of nurturing the physical, emotional and spiritual bits of those dependent souls in our care would be the most important thing we could ever do.
Home is the most influential environment for the most vital lessons about life to the most vulnerable among us. Home is where we learn to love or where we learn to hate. It is a place of forgiveness or it can be the place we become hardened by broken expectations. Home is the place that we come back to, like base in a game of chase or it is the place that we cannot wait to travel far enough from to forget.
Home, when we are young, is the starting place of all of our ideas about what our own homes and families will be.
Home matters. The homes we build, not of brick and mortar, but of truth, mercy and love, will determine the kind of people that the world will be made of. It was to be a sacred place of refuge and a living classroom filled with learning that equips future generations with the lessons in discipline, faith and healthy relationships. Home is meant to be the place where we learn how to treat others, tell the truth and persevere through difficult trials.
It often takes me by surprise when the roles of motherhood and homemaking are not considered a position of value in our culture, instead considered almost primitive or second rate. I am even more shocked when my own feelings of guilt threaten to bubble up and choke the mission of motherhood right out of me. This guilt works hard to convince me that what I do in the context of my home has no real value to this world.
But if home is truly where love begins, I need to grasp with both hands, that it would also be the most tender and vulnerable point of attack by the enemy of my soul through the misguided ideas of our culture.
So, I need to work to regain a joyful perspective based on the truth instead of the culture. When I am cooking a meal I am teaching my children that breaking bread is a remedy for breaking hearts. When the world and my own uninvited thoughts tell me that I am not making progress because of the choice I made to serve my family, I can trust deep in my heart that there is no greater purpose or achievement than caring for another person.
Progress often takes us away, enchanting us with hopes of significance, when it is the relationships we have in our life that give us the greatest sense of satisfaction and meaning.
Home is the stage where the greatest loves of our lives all come together to be reminded of what is most important. It is the place where we remove our shoes because we realize that we are on sacred ground.