I go to prepare a place for you to rest. John 14:2 (TPT)
Reconstruct Our Hearts – The Home Series (updated) – Part 4
(back by popular request, edited and updated!)
Go to PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | PART 6 | PART 7
Pliny the Elder was a Naval and Army commander for the early Roman Empire. He spent much of his life on expeditions, missions and traveling in “the field.” It’s no wonder he penned the famous quote, “Home is where the heart is.” He knew a thing or two about longing for home.
His quote can also be translated as, “Family is where the heart is.”
For some of us, family is the LAST place we call home.
Several months ago, I drove four hours to see my Grandfather who is dying of emphysema. I hadn’t seen him (we call him ‘Pa’) for about ten years. He has never met my children. Things have happened in my family that has torn us apart. It's messy and complicated, uncomfortable and upsetting.
“Family/home is where the heart is.” Could there be a more loaded quote?
These words conjure up warm fuzzy feelings of tender longings for the place where we belong. But just as our hearts carry ALL that is US, so too, do our homes and families (wherever and whoever they may be). They are not exclusive, but rather inclusive of all the good, the bad, the ugly and beautiful parts of life.
Home is where you laugh and cry; make stuff and break stuff; wash dirty clothes and put clean ones away; take off your smelly shoes and kick them under the bed. Where you eat great meals and cook some bad ones; lie awake at night worrying, or sleep soundly, dreaming. Where you yell at your kids and then hug them to sleep. It's where you fight with your partner, and share intimate moments. Our homes are battlegrounds and dream factories and peaceful havens and correctional facilities and everything else in between. It's the collective space of the entirety of life. A place where you can be yourself (unchallenged and challenged) in any and every season. The good and the bad alike.
Home isn’t the house you’re paying off or the place where you eat, sleep and live. Home is where you keep on returning to at the end of the day. It's the place where you wake and prepare your heart for what is to come. It’s where you can be you – no masks, no pretending. It absolutely can be a structure, room, a house. But it's also your thoughts, your memories, and your dreams. Your people, too: they are your home just as much as a building. Maybe it can be said that home is the place that occupies your heart, and the place your heart continually returns.
It doesn’t mean its clean and tidy, designer-styled and expensively furnished. Home is a place where whether you are these things or not, it doesn’t matter.
When I think of my Pa, pain blooms in my heart for many different reasons. But that doesn’t make him any less family, any less part of my home. That’s something that the dysfunction I’ve experienced these last few years is teaching me. My heart keeps returning to thoughts of him. There’s room in my house (heart) for that.
Jesus said, “My Father’s house has many dwelling places. If it were otherwise, I would tell you plainly, because I go to prepare a place for you to rest. And when everything is ready, I will come back and take you into me so that you will be where I am. And you already know the way to the place where I’m going.”
Perhaps instead of speaking of heaven, Jesus was referencing the here and now, heaven on earth, kingdom come and kingdom coming. Perhaps the place he prepares is the foundation of our lives; the walls, floors, rooms, and contents. Maybe he takes us to live within ourselves – a place we rarely dare venture. Not the self that needs to impress and perform; not the false-self built from a place of seeking approval and belonging. He deconstructs our lives to reconstruct our hearts. And it's a life long experience: tearing down walls, fears, offenses, unforgiveness, ideas and more, and rebuilding them with faith, hope, and love. A place where everything in our lives is included, redeemed and restored. Resurrected into our original design.
In this case, indeed, home is where the heart is.
Go to Part 5 – Deep Down Within Us »
Written by Lizzy Milani
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