Blog Post

When this House became a Home

maggiejsifuentes • May 13, 2016

The first time we walked through the house we now live in, I didn’t think it could ever feel like a home. The living room was huge and open and empty with smudged walls and hard floors. There were no cushy floors or surfaces – things that feel like home to me – and the only living room furniture we had at the time was one small, brown couch. And I could just picture our little couch swallowed up in that massive room. We weren’t going to have a budget for furniture or curtains or decor. We were not planning to live here for more than a couple of years and it didn’t seem worthwhile to save up for too much in the way of area rugs and furniture. The kitchen wallpaper was tearing, all the bedrooms had neon green and blue walls and the living room was so big it felt more like a warehouse than a home. Initially, I was opposed to living here. But we needed somewhere and this was where the door was open to us. It was really a huge blessing, and I didn’t want to see it that way. We were in need of somewhere else to live and we never would have been able to live here had God not opened hearts and doors. It was bigger than we could have asked for.

We unsettled and moved, six months after doing it before, our fourth place to live in three years. We moved into this house and, of course, my longing was to make it home. For us and for our girls.

And I was delighted to be gifted with so many things that make this place feel more like a home – to arrange the things together and watch them give shape to a place we feel comfy to sprawl out on the rug with our girls, or gather around a meal with friends.

We all long to know home, a place to feel secure, a place to share love with our people.

I bought this sign recently, because the words speak much to my longing for home. Because, of course, though I might work to make a place we call home, home is not as much the place, as the people I’m with. Home is with the ones I love and even when I have none left on earth to share it with, home is with Christ who lives in me. Wherever I am, with Christ in me, that is home.

And how beautiful to know that He calls me home, too.

“Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.” 1 Cor. 3:16-17

In all the mess I see in me, He makes the place holy and calls me home. He is the One who keeps house here. He will never sit by to see His temple in me destroyed. He is fiercely committed to the home He is making in me.

I am His building, His house where He works in the grace, all the grace needed for this piece of the world to reflect His beauty. He provides the color, the story, the cozy. He provides grace to clear the cobwebs and dust. And I get to be walls and beams that He resides in and works in. I am the temple He calls holy. And He invites me to open the doors and share the home He’s making here, to show the beauty He makes to my little part of the world.

I am His house and that may seem small, but were it not for Him taking up housekeeping here, I would be an empty, lonely building longing for someone to take the space my rooms offered and make them a place where love happened. That was what I was.

But He has called me holy. He resides here and gives grace to open my doors and let love flow in and out. I am not a lonely building today. I am not just a house because my God, He saw my potential. And He has called me home.

 

Blessings! If you’d like to see the before pictures from the rearranging I’ve done recently, you can see them here.

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