For the Christian, home here on the earth is temporary, our real home is in heaven. However, our time here should be of some earthly good for ourselves and others.
Tom Lathan writes in The Wall Street Journal about developing a “sense of home.”
I’ve never had much of a sense of home. Before the age of 21, I’d moved house roughly 20 times, from the army base in West Germany where I was born to YMCA housing in southern England in my late teens. My itinerant childhood gave me itchy feet as an adult. Wherever I landed, I’d soon feel pulled toward the next place, and then the next.
I assumed it was my lot to never feel “at home” anywhere. That is, until a pair of robins appeared in my back garden one spring a few years ago… Because I was always moving, I never took much care in making a home for myself…But the robins that arrived that spring clearly saw something in our broken-down home that I didn’t.
Each morning, I watched with fascination as they flitted about the garden, combing bugs from unruly brambles and collecting twigs from the unswept patio, then disappearing into the mass of ivy I’d neglected to trim. It was captivating. It was also nerve-racking: The robins had chosen to nest low in the ivy, well within reach of a curious cat’s paw…
I found myself becoming fiercely protective of the nesting robins. I relocated my desk to the back room overlooking the garden and started leaving offerings on the patio: seeds and mealworms, moss I’d gathered on walks. I listened intently for the robins’ alarm calls or the sinister pitter-patter of a cat slinking over the fence…I bought a water pistol and kept it loaded to the back door… I had somehow become a full-time security detail for a couple of birds.
Something else happened during my vigil over these birds. Watching them diligently build their home left me feeling differently about my own. Home, I began to see wasn’t just a steppingstone, a detour, but a place I needed to be actively building. If I ever hoped to feel a sense of belonging, I needed to put some effort into making a place my own.
