Lately I’ve been thinking about home. Recent circumstances have prevented my family from settling into one place. We have lived in five places in seven months, and this all at a time when my already strong nesting instincts were in overdrive as we welcomed a baby into our family. This has also been a challenge for me because I love setting up house. I have always enjoyed trying to create warm, restful places in our apartments in Galati. In doing this, I have carefully considered simplicity’s role in order to honor my friends who are poor. I think about what my friends can and can’t afford. When they visit, I want them to feel comfortable and not awkward because of the economic differences between us. I want them to feel at home.
But practicing simplicity while setting up a home has truly challenged me. I might think that even a cheap lamp, plain picture frame or simple wooden shelf would make a certain corner much cozier and more inviting, but then feel silly for caring so much about such a detail when I’d pass children each morning, friends of mine, who were living in makeshift lean-tos. They were kicked out of their houses and spent much of the bitter winter living on the streets. And I was worrying about adding a final aesthetic touch to my warm apartment?
Yet I don’t think that guilt is a healthy companion in learning to live simply. In fact, one of the gifts of simplicity is freedom. And when I really think about it, it has not so much been the belongings around me that make me feel at home as it has been the people with whom I have shared space.
Upon returning to Galati this fall after the birth of our first son, I journaled feelings of confusion regarding where “home” was. We had spent the summer living with my parents in the house where I had a very happy childhood. We continue to create warm memories each time my family gathers in those familiar rooms. I was home. Yet when we returned to Galati, I also felt that I was coming home — home to a community with whom I serve and worship, home to children who are drawing me toward the heart of God. But because having all the people I love in one place can only be a dream for now, I often feel both at home and away from home at the same time — a simultaneous comfort and aching, a rootedness and a restlessness.
Isn’t this feeling shared by all humanity? Aren’t we all aching for the perfect dwelling for which we were created? The poor know the very concrete reality of homelessness, and the rich, too, feel the emptiness, despite their distractions. And we are all separated at some point from those we love.
Through missing my loved ones, through moving from place to place, through my struggles in setting up a simple house that honors my poor friends, I’m hearing God speak to me: First make your home in Me. God brings to mind the Scriptures. “Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations” (Ps. 90:1). “My dwelling place will be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people” (Ezek. 37:27). In God we are to “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
To create a space that welcomes and honors others is to first ground myself in the knowledge that God lives in me and I in God. More than offering the children I work among a comfortable house to visit, I pray that I can be an example for them of being at home wherever I am, because I’m at home with Christ. May we live in Christ and know that He lives in us.
Photo: Sarah Leckie
Robin, Josh and Luka are now well-settled into an apartment near Casa la “Vale,” where there is usually music playing and hot water ready for tea. If you come to visit, you will notice that Luka has broadened Robin’s musical tastes to include Raffi and “Animal Folk Songs for Children.”