With the advent of a new school year, I’ve been thinking about what home means and especially what it means for my daughter when she returns from school. I want our home to always be that safe haven for her, a place where she feels secure, and a place where she ALWAYS feels she belongs. I like to make things as cozy and welcoming as possible. I’ve put out fall garlands and orange fairy lights and this morning I’m baking peanut butter cookies. I try to be emotionally available and ready to read books or just talk once she’s off school. Hopefully, she’ll look back in years to come and remember the welcoming and warmth of our home.

A lot of money and time is offered to consumerism in order to  create our own private haven in our homes. We do this with decorations and landscaping. I’ve heard people describe their yard as a “little piece of paradise.”  Our hearts yearn for that safety and satisfaction of home, and homemaking can be a redemptive act.

Home can be that place where we practice for a coming eternity with Jesus, mimicking what’s to come. It’s where we practice and employ the fruits of the spirit–where love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control can be practiced regularly.

Yet no matter how “homey” I make things, there is always that discontent, that longing for something more, that sense that something is missing. Selfishness, impatience, and sin seem to always come in and try to spoil the peace of our homes.

This quote from C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity comes to mind, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

We should not be surprised then that there’s no true satisfaction to be found in this world because we were made for a DIFFERENT world. Jesus tells us in John 14:2, “My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? ” The ways we make a home here on earth offer just a shadow of the true home that awaits us in heaven. I get chills when I hear the lyrics of the song “Who You Say I Am” by Hillsong United.

“I’m a child of God
Yes I am
In my Father’s house
There’s a place for me”

It’s the kind of home that will always satisfy. It’s the kind of home where we always belong. It’s the kind of home where we’ll look around and say, “Ah yes, this is what I’ve been longing for.”

This doesn’t mean I’ll stop decorating my house or trying to create a haven for my family or stop imitating Jesus. It just means that I’ll know that whatever is missing, I’ll find in the next life. Because my true home is in heaven. I’m just a traveler here on earth making the best of what God has given me.

Sarah Clews loves being the wife of Carson and mother to three little girls. She received her degree in English from Corban University and still loves the craft of writing. She also helps her husband run a martial arts school. In her free time, Sarah enjoys talking with grown-ups (!), finding new authors, doing online research, and reading her favorite childhood stories to her girls.