Home

As I sit here in my living room, amidst all the boxes we are filling with our books and decorations, I am noticing that our home is feeling less like our home and more like a parking space for our stuff. (And what I notice next is how much stuff we have!) Anyway, it brings to mind a debate that often runs through my mind...is home a specific place or is it a way of life? I waver between two sides of myself on this, the one who wants to give my kids everything and the side that knows that as long as our family is full of love and laughter we are at home anywhere. I know, pretty idyllic, right? We all know those things that give us fond memories of our childhood homes, but I think what we settle on remembering is how our home felt growing up. Was it warm and inviting, or cold, maybe there was a lot of anger or depression that made it feel dark and unwelcoming. Our stuff is only a small portion of creating the atmosphere of our home, the rest comes from the hearts that reside there. So as I de-clutter our home of all the broken, useless, outgrown stuff that we have packed in, I find myself de-cluttering my heart of those same things. Memories of anger or hurt, places I don't naturally want to go to, and that I try to gloss over in everyday life. But I don't really know what to do with all that baggage.

I've been reading the book Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert, and this lovely memoir of her year traveling and doing just that, de-cluttering her heart, has inspired me to embrace the painful parts of life. She writes about embracing the negative aspects of herself, the anger and insecurity, actually welcoming them into her heart and telling them that she has enough love for even them to reside. Now, my physical home does not have endless boundaries for the things of life to fill, but by opening our hearts we can actually take the extra baggage out and instead of working so hard to shove it out the door, we can instead put it in its rightful place...under our love and God's love. That's amazing to me. And that is home to me. A family that can take anger, insecurity, and pain and instead of rejecting it or ignoring it, place it under love creates a home that is beyond walls. Needless to say, I hope our family learns to take steps toward this kind of home this summer while we also begin the search for purpose and place.