Hinterhaus to Home

A house is a shelter, a place to lay down and sleep. It’s a place to eat a meal and have a conversation if you are so inclined. A house has been a blessing, a rescue and a refuge to me when I needed a place to go, but a house is not a “home”.

A home, it’s a place for hospitality and for solitude, it’s a resting place… if you’re blessed. A home is a place of expression and heart, a place of beauty and art. Some days it is a studio and a workshop, it’s a library, a gallery and a lab. It’s a space to be quiet, it’s a hall to get loud. It’s a nursery and an infirmary, a greenhouse and nut-house some days. It can be a dance floor for just one, or for many more. On dark days, it’s an asylum because my mind and heart yet needs a hand, others it’s a karaoke bar and things get real loud. A home is a hospital for shattered bodies, hearts and minds, a place to convalesce, to renew your will to go on. And it’s a morgue for broken hearts and for old habits to lay down stiff and cold before their final burial.

A house is not a home until I can scrawl a line on a clean wall above a moppy-ten-year-old head of hair because boys grow like a kudzu vine in summer time. It’s not my home until I can set a pot of violets on the ledge, play the same soft song through all the halls on loop for days on end and hang a picture just so. A house is a home when magnets secure photos and love notes on the refrigerator door and there is a book waiting for me on the end table… even if it waits for months. It’s not a home til I can throw open the curtains when sunbeams are pushy…just so nosy to see inside all my rooms. In my home I want to let them all in.

A house is a wonderful thing, but they say a “home” is where your heart is. Sometimes a heart gets so very tired from aimless walking and needs a home to rest in and to rule. In your home your thoughts tumble out wherever they derned-well-please and your colors and ideas explode on walls and light up your own eyes again; you hang your coat there, you put your cup there and your decorations and your things find legitimacy again.

I’ve lived in houses. It’s a wonderful thing to be sheltered in someone else’s domain, to enjoy their essence, relax in their atmosphere and safety (if there is peace in their place) and see their life lived out–in their home. Like a good husband, I think one who has a home is to guard, nurture and protect their own place, overseeing with love, caring for the needs. There are electric bills to pay, grass to mow, repairs to tend to when the need arises. When you husband your home you find solutions to problems; doors that won’t lock, windows with cracks, disputes that won’t quit. You keep out intruders, rebel rousers, those who disrespect the peace so that your place is safe for you and for all.

When you have a home you plant gardens, fruit trees, your favorite oaks, vineyards and patches of hollyhocks, sunflowers and daisies (if you’re me, you do—you do!!). You let privet bloom and surprise lilies delight you. “Surprise!” You put a school bell at the top of a pole, hang a wind chime, and set a homemade, wooden bird feeder on the porch that says, “Rhonda” in big red letters and you plant those lavender irises because they make you remember being loved. When you have a home you open and close the door, you rule a little dot upon the earth.

And all this has me feeling my way around my own heart, that place that is God’s dearly loved home. I’m checking the doors, securing the windows, but opening up the blinds for the sunbeams, leaving open the upstairs windows for little moonbeams too. I’m rechecking the altar of my home. What’s in this temple of flesh and blood sitting inside wood and stone and under a shingled, steep roof? Is there a “living sacrifice” on the altar, or not? Have I made the sacrifice that will propel me into His will for me; His purpose and His plan? I want His home to be worthy of His office here. I want to open the doors to the guests He brings, the love He planned, to the parties He instigates, to laughing fits, late night conversations, hugs and tears, meals and arguments that find resolve, to the hope He has to give.

Like a prospective husband He has made His intentions towards me clear, but I am so very slow….I am still working on mine. So He asks me yet again, “What are your intentions towards Me, Daughter? Am I your heart? Am I your home? I have defined my relationship with you, now will you define all of yours to Me?”

I call my new home Hinterhaus, like I called the writing shed out back of here. I am making it feel like “home”.

Isaiah 54:6 For the Eternal has called you to come back home, like a young wife, once deserted and deeply injured. Now God is pulling you close again.