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.”* Read this quote again because it is so foreign to most of us that we need repetition for it to sink in.

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

Home is the birthplace of meaning.

Therefore your “place” … your home … matters immensely. That’s good to remember when you look around your home and you feel everything is messy … or you wish it was larger or more modern and up to date.

As I imagine these sad children I can’t help but see my home in a completely different light. I don’t like Cheerios under foot, but homeless children make me grateful my children (and now grandchildren) 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, NASB). 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, NASB).

As intended, these words of Jesus impart great hope and comfort. Think about God having a house and you’re 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 where they return 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 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 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 a place of crucial importance!

*When Invisible Children Sing, by Dr. Chi Huang

For more on how to help orphans, foster kids and invisible children go to Christian Alliance for Orphans at CAFO.org.