When Your Home Doesn’t Look Like What You Want

Do you know there are children who have lived all their lives in gutters, in sewer pipes, or other unimaginable places? Children who sleep on cardboard, who sniff glue to numb their pain, who never cry, who fear anyone who tries to help because they have learned to trust no one?

A doctor who has worked for years among these invisible children wrote, “The longer children live on the streets, the more they realize the meaninglessness of words.”*

For these millions, yes millions, of children in cities around the world the words “home,” “family,” “mother,” “father,” “love,” “right,” “wrong,” “peace,” and “hope” are words and concepts that mean nothing. They have never known home or family as it was intended, the birthplace of meaning. They are hungry, abused, neglected and often die alone.

Home is the birthplace of meaning. Therefore place, your home, matters immensely.

As I imagine these sad children I can’t help but see my home in a completely different light. Cheerios under foot still create work for me, still are not what I desire for my home, but the homeless children make me grateful my children have a real floor and plenty of food to eat. Place matters.

In the story of creation it is written, “the Lord God planted a garden toward the east in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed,” (Genesis 2:8). Of all the geographic options on the globe, God chose one spot as home for Adam and Eve. Eden was a specified place with borders. We know this because after they sinned God drove them out from that place and stationed cherubim on guard so they couldn’t get back in.

Home as a place was also a significant theme in Jesus’ last words to His disciples before He went to the cross. As He talked to them about His coming departure He described their future home: “In my Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you,” (John 14:2).

As intended, these words of Jesus impart great hope and comfort. Think about God having a house and your being invited to live there with Him! All for me? I feel loved and cared for at the sound of “a place for you.” Do you too?

Our experience of home and place today is a preparation for a better home in the future. Living in a structure we call home, even a less than ideal one, gives definition to the concept of a future home in heaven.

Intuitively even neglected street children understand place as they form small units of belonging and find familiar corners or sections of sewer to return to day after day for shelter.

Having a place to come home to, a place to belong gives value to your life and to your children’s. A place that is ours draws us back like a magnet. It doesn’t matter how big or small, fancy or plain; a tiny apartment in New York City, a hutong in China, a tin shack in Africa, or an upper middle class ‘mansion.’

What matters is that your children and you have a home and each other. When we moms understand the unseen value of home we worry less about the seen; how clean or up to date our place of residence is.

Home is the birthplace of meaning. In the places God gives us each to live He calls us to create stability, encourage peace, foster growth, teach values, model grace and forgiveness, and most of all encounter and experience the living Christ.

In spite of its myriad challenges, abounding disagreements, and the sin that lives in every member, a family’s dwelling place is of immense value.

Be encouraged, moms, single women, empty nesters; your home even with its many imperfections is still crucially important!

“God, help us be teachable grace filled people who train and transform lives at home and around the world. May we see the invisible children who are near; in our cities, in our children’s schools, and know what we can do, that all may taste your goodness. Amen.”

*When Invisible Children Sing, Dr. Chi Huang for more on how to help orphans, foster kids and invisible children go to Christian Alliance for Orphans at CAFO.org.