The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

by Sally Clarkson

Our hearts hunger for a community where we are intimate members, a sense of belonging to people who love us. Our souls crave a purpose bigger than our jobs, a connection to a sense of meaning.

So we focused on creating home out of less tangible materials—traditions, habits, rhythms, experiences, and values. It was in the love and acceptance we shared, the comfort and warmth we enjoyed together, the spiritual and intellectual connections we fostered, and the traditions we celebrated together that we found both refuge from the world outside and the strength to engage it creatively.

What greater joy can there be than to create a holding place for all that is sacred in life: faith, love, God, purpose, beauty, relationships, creativity, fun, the art of life, safety, shelter, feasting?

His Kingdom comes in the way we celebrate, the shelter we make of our homes, the joy we put into what we cook and eat and create, our willingness to welcome strangers into our midst. As the Holy Spirit fills us, our families and friendships and the particular physical spaces of our lives become the spaces where Christ is born again and again—growing, ordering, renewing, healing.

heart that loves God, an imagination fired by His Spirit, and hands ready to create. And, well, a bit of courage, too. It takes grit to confront those fallen realms of loneliness, those empty spaces, and fill them.

overuse of virtual reality and technological media is causing us to become mentally and emotionally absent from the present world of incarnational action. The online world occupies a space separate

“The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it.”[2]

bills, yard work, shopping, hosting guests, setting

I was freshly aware of the fact that life can be very hard, not in dramatic ways, but in small, daily realities.

but as the tangible, daily outgrowth of the spiritual values we hold most deeply.

the truth that God created the physical world to house and express the spiritual.

How will children encounter nature? Will they be distracted by technologies set in their hands since birth, or will they have learned to look, to love, to hold the world around them as holy?

Faith wasn’t just something we were taught in church. It was the air we breathed.

“Unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3).

In a family, a strong culture allows each member to feel confident and comfortable, to understand how he or she interacts in every situation that comes along.