It’s time to place another chip on my millennial bingo card: I, a 32-year-old, married mother of three, am living in my mother’s basement.
My family spent the past eight years living in Louisville, Kentucky, where we enjoyed a unique and, in many ways, idyllic living arrangement. In 2017 my husband’s best friend and his wife purchased a multi-acre property that included two houses — the original, two-bedroom farmhouse and a more recent build. They moved into the recent build, then extended to my husband and me, along with our infant son, an invitation to become tenants of the charming, red farmhouse. At the time we were living in a cramped, white-walled box of an apartment, so to accept was easy. Over the next seven years, this was the house that provided the setting for the formative memories of our young family of three — then four, then five.
The two houses sat atop a steep, grassy hill surrounded by woods — our gentle haven outside the anxious, orange glow of the city. A creek ran through the property, and there my sons spent their summers catching crawdads and scouring the tree line for killdeer and kingfishers. Our friends have five sons, straddled in age with our three, and our combined pack of wild boys spent full days together outdoors — trekking through the woods, building teepees from fallen sycamore branches, and snatching up unsuspecting box turtles. For several years I kept a large flock of chickens and barnyard ducks, who daily laid for us a rainbow of fresh eggs.
From the outside looking in, it was a storybook existence. Friends and visitors made sure to tell me so. The blessing of spending those years in that house was invaluable to our young family, and often I pinched myself in astonishment at the reality that we had been afforded such a gracious habitat.
But all the time, my heart was restless. The house never felt quite like “home.” My sense of disconnect had nothing to do with the house or the environment itself. It stemmed, rather, from the fact that we did not own the house — that our time there would necessarily be temporary, even if I didn’t know at the time just how long that “temporary” season would be. I wanted to feel attached to a place, but the place was not mine to embrace. As much as I delighted in the whimsical calm of our precious house on the hill, I wrestled constantly with the tension of wanting to cultivate further its beauty and orderliness, yet knowing that we would never receive a return on any investment of effort or expenditure.
My heart ached to put down roots — to be the matriarch of my own little piece of the cosmos, where I could “work it and keep it” as Genesis 2:15 says, and where our family could build something of a legacy. I suspect that many in my generation have wrestled with similar longings and disappointments. To many of us, the financial possibility of homeownership is a pipe dream. Those who are able to afford a house often encounter the frustrating realization that the tiny, outdated bungalow that they thought would be their temporary “starter home” might, actually, need to be their “forever home.”
Many of us were raised in churches that preached a framework of practical discipleship that depended on the presupposition that one day we would all secure noble homes for our families where we could hang on the wall a handsome placard declaring, “As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” More recently, we have received the admonition that “the gospel comes with a house key,” and if this is the case, then it follows that we first need a house — preferably a lovely, comfortable one with a big dining room table — if we desire to extend “biblical hospitality.” We harbor quiet anxiety and shame that won’t be real adults or, perhaps, even real, full disciples of Christ until the time when we might finally land our families in a house in which we feel permanently settled and from which we can extend hospitality.
Earlier this year, my husband accepted a job in my hometown of Atlanta. Rather than scrambling to move into the first house we could afford, we accepted my parents’ generous offer to let us live in their home for several months in order to build our down payment savings.
When we left Louisville, I worried that in moving back into my childhood home — knowing that our existence here would be temporary and that I would be separated from the life-giving activities of cultivating a home — my deep longings for a permanent home might intensify and perhaps even become unbearable. As it turns out though, to my surprise and delight, this temporary stay has been exactly the medicine that my heart has needed.
I think I’m beginning to understand what Jesus means when he says, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Matt 8:20). Most deliberations on the “homelessness” of Jesus that I have heard throughout my Christian life explain that Jesus is here reminding us that, “Our real home is in heaven, not on this earth.” This platitude has never sat right with me, and although I can appreciate that it is trying to redirect believers to a proper and biblical hope in the eschaton, I would argue that in its most obvious sense it obfuscates the holistic message of Scripture.
The first two chapters of the Bible teach that God directed (and continues to uphold) each detail of the earth’s creation specifically so that it might serve as a home for his creatures. Furthermore, Scripture is clear that God’s ultimate plan for the earth is not to obliterate it, but to create it anew (2 Pet 3:13; Rev 21:1). God created humans to be embodied creatures who inhabit a physical homeland. Earth is our real home — albeit not in its current form, which is thoroughly corrupted by sin and brokenness, but in its God-ordained essence. Contrary to what might at first seem obvious, I would like to submit to you that, actually, Jesus was not homeless. Perhaps he did not choose to lay his head in any singular, stationary locale, but ultimately it would have been redundant for him to “own” a home. The entire cosmos already belonged to him.
The concept of personal property may be a helpful and necessary guideline for human societies in the current, broken order of the world, but ultimately it is nothing more than a temporal construct — one by which God does not himself abide, and one that is subordinate to the superior ownership of God.
Humans have made quite a mess of the home that God has given to us to steward, but he has not abandoned us, nor has he abandoned the earth. This is the gospel: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). In compassion Christ condescends into the disaster zone we have created and sets to work to rebuild what has been broken — and he calls his followers to do the same.
This transforms our understanding of biblical hospitality. Through the example of Jesus, we now see that hospitality is not a matter of welcoming people into a home of our own, but a matter of using whatever material resources are at our disposal in order to make others feel welcomed and loved in this home that belongs to God, which he has granted to mankind as a benevolent gift. In other words, hospitality is an exercise of meeting others where they are through localized, embodied means, thereby spreading the transforming power of God’s grace across the face of the earth.
This is the vision of biblical hospitality that empowers missionaries to forfeit a settled and secure life at home in order to pursue lives of uprooted, active compassion to the ends of the earth, and this is the vision of biblical hospitality that can set all believers free from anxious attachment toward their longings of homeownership.
I am, of course, eagerly anticipating the near future, whenever my husband and I are finally able to move out of my parents’ house and into a place of our own, but I can now recognize this short season as nomads as a precious gift of Christ — one that my heart has needed desperately for some time. By removing me completely from my natural strivings to try to put down roots, God has opened my eyes to the multitude of opportunities to invest in people that become available when I’m not so caught up in investing in my dwelling place. I may not currently be able to invite friends over for dinner parties, but I am still empowered to extend hospitality anytime I make space in my heart for the people in my life to come as they are and receive the grace of Christ through acts of embodied compassion.
Whether or not the world recognizes you as a “homeowner,” if you are alive and God has placed your feet on terra firma, you are already home. God has given those made in his image this earth share and steward together, and he will empower us to “feel at home” not when we scramble to cordon off parcels of property for the purposes of our own pleasure and agenda, but rather when we use whatever embodied resources we have — including but not limited to spatial ones — in order to love God and love our neighbor.
If you do own your dream home, you are welcome to recognize it as a gift from your good father. Dedicate it toward the mission of welcoming your neighbor into a place where they feel valued, heard, and cared for all to the glory of Christ. But if you are a renter, a nomad, a wanderer like me, take heart: The entire earth belongs to your God, and he has given all of it benevolently to you to enjoy, to explore, and to steward. You are at home, and Christ will meet you here.