A place of divine dwelling: your home {Thoughts from my private journal}

My thoughts from my morning journaling...

Twenty years ago when Kennedy and I stood at the marriage altar, we didn't think much about the journey we were about to take.  We loved Christ and each other, that, we thought, was enough to build our life on.

We had a new life together, soon our lives would include another and another, and another and ... .

There were so many things we had not learned... many things that we did not know.

When we stand at the altar and profess our love are we really prepared to love?  Do we realize the sacrifices love will call us to, the ripping away of self?

Why didn't the well-intended tell us what it really took to build a home?

Why didn't they tell us about all of the heartache and pain that went into loving and building correctly?

We didn't know that love and good intentions could be misconstrued by the loved one to the point that it causes us pain. I never knew love could hurt and the very man who said, "He loved me could and would hurt me so deep."

I didn't know these things.  I didn't know pain can go deep when you love.

I didn't know back then that even though God loved me, God would allow pain to befall me.  Or that when God loves His children sometimes He allows them to be wounded deeply.

Love hurts I learned and the one you are building your life and home with will sometimes be the very one to hurt you deep. No one sat us down and made that plain.

Everyone celebrated our young, blossoming love with us, but no one told us that sometimes the one you love the most will hurt you the most.  Sometimes... well, love just hurts and its pain can go deep.

"He who hurts the most loves the most?"  Is that really true and accurate?

In 'Somewhere More Holy' author Tony Woodlief writes, "Each trouble you face will yield a blessing out of all proportion to the pain."


The well-intended ones never explained this to us.  I guess this is the kind of stuff that only living can teach you.  It's best understood... better grasped through the wadding through.  Maybe they knew that living it was the only real way we could understand it. 


The wise know not to come between young love.


"Before the explosion of churches, some homes had altars.  The first temple, in fact, was called the Mishkan: a place of divine dwelling...

The first church in the Abrahamic faiths, in other words, was a home.


God chose to live among His people.


Home, in this earlier understanding was more than a venue for eating and sleeping...


Home was a holy place.

Sometimes the pain that is caused by the one we share our home with can cause our vision to become blur and we forget what a home is really meant to be our holy place.  Home is not the battle ground.


We have forgotten this ... that our homes are to be the holy places.


Sometimes we begin looking...searching... searching for God, for love out there... over there, up there ... over here... But we have forgotten that ... 


... that God is always where we are.  He's always with His children.  God is right here in our midst.  He's in our homes.  Have you forgotten that He dwells among us?

Some of us even find it fitting to think that in order to find the God that we long for we must leave home, get dressed up, put on fake smiles and go ...

Yes.  We are called to go to church, not to forsake the assembling, but with that being said, home is meant to be our first sacred place because we are meant to be sacred.


The first place we meet God each and every day is in our homes, regardless if we realize it or not. Our sacred dwelling—our homes is where we will find God first.


So turn your heart homeward if you're looking for God.


Do you want a sacred home?  Begin with sanctifying yourself.  I can share these things with you because I know what it is like to turn your heart away from home.  I know what it is like to have done shameful things.  I've been in the dark places.  And I have learned after being in the dark to appreciate the light that I've been given.

For me, I am learning all over again from the deep pain and wounds of loving that home is more than a place where we eat and sleep.  Home is where we grow, learn, love, forgive, hope and continuously give grace, and in the midst of it all we even have the blessing of seeing little glimpses of heaven—that we can only find in our homes... our place of divine dwelling.


I found this at Ann's and found it to be quite fitting for what I wrote today so I share it with you.

Helen Keller on slowing to Really See…

‘I, who cannot see, find hundreds of things to interest me through mere touch.

I feel the delicate symmetry of a leaf.

I pass my hands lovingly about the smooth skin of a silver birch, or the rough shaggy bark of a pine….

I feel the delightful, velvety texture of a flower, and discover its remarkable convolutions; and something of the miracle… is revealed to me.

Occasionally, if I am very fortunate, I place my hand gently on a small tree and feel the happy quiver of a bird in full song….

At times my heart cries out with longing to see these things. If I can get so much pleasure from mere touch, how much more beauty must be revealed by sight.

Yet, those who have eyes apparently see little. The panorama of color and action which fills the world is taken for granted….

It is a great pity that, in the world of light, the gift of sight is used only as a mere convenience rather than as a means of —

adding fullness to life.”

~Helen Keller

xo, Angela

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