09.24.10

what a home really is

‘We weren’t thinking about ghosts, and the meaning of home, when we started our family.

We were a thousand miles from where we grew up, we had a new baby girl, and we were living new lives. We had yet to learn the things I am going to tell you.

We didn’t understand that, however much he may love us, God allows his children to be wounded. 

We didn’t yet see that home is a sacred place, and sacred places must sometimes be sanctified by the heart’s own suffering.”

  ~Somewhere More Holy, Tony Woodlief

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“What they don’t tell you, the well-intentioned people who quote Bible verses, is that God never promised everything will work out okay in your lifetime, and that each trouble you face will yield a blessing out of all proportion to the pain.

Oswald Chambers wrote that God doesn’t promise deliverance from trouble; he promises deliverance in trouble. 

It’s a subtle distinction that carries all the weight of a dying world.” 


~Somewhere More Holy, Tony Woodlief

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“Before the explosion of churches, some homes even 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…
It was a holy place.”
“Somewhere along the way we forgot this. We began to think that God was out there — in heaven, a sunset, an ornate temple, a megachurch. We forgot that He has always come to where we are, to dwell with us. We began to think of him as being somewhere else, and told ourselves that we had to get dressed up, put on smiles and go out to find him.
We forgot that home was meant to be a sacred place because we were meant to be sacred.“

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“This book is a story of how we reclaim the things that are lost. It’s also the story of how a home can become sacred, and how in the process in can sanctify us as well.
I can tell you these things because I have been in dark places — which is the only way any of us ever learn to to love the light.
I know what it is to do shameful things, and to have the front door opened to me in spite of them. Home is more than a place where we eat and sleep; it is where we learn grace, where we glimpse heaven. 
It is where we find or lose God, or perhaps where He finds us…. if we will only be still long enough to listen for Him.“

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I’ve read selections of Somewhere More Holy: Stories from a Bewildered Father, Stumbling Husband, Reluctant Handyman and Prodigal Son several times… on the days when I’ve eaten the forbidden fruit, apple from the beginning, and I have fallen and I have sinned.

On the days when I have hollered and wailed and stomped and thrown up my hands in despair. When I have looked at the upended house and the angry children and can’t remember at all how to do this… why to do all this.

Tony Woodlief is an honest man, an uncommonly amazing writer, and the homeschooling father of four sons and he writes and you laugh, because he’s funny and he knows this wild way…. and he writes and you cry because he buried his first and only daughter and he knows the ways of God.

A thoughtful, tender book, a powerfully probing book that tears the heart open to tears and laughter and the ordinary wonder of family, this is an uplifting book, a read even for Dad — and a book I keep returning to, one connected to a home’s Cross-beam that is weight bearing and holds our lives.

In the day’s last light… when the shafts fall heavy on the dust and the piles … I remember that Home is holy ground and Peace is a person and He lives in this place... teaching us the ways of Grace.

:::

Somewhere More Holy: Stories from a Bewildered Father, Stumbling Husband, Reluctant Handyman, and Prodigal Son
Somewhere More Holy: Stories from a Bewildered Father, Stumbling Husband, Reluctant Handyman, and Prodigal Son

Photos: glimpses of our home
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Posted in Books, Family, Homemaking, Homeschooling, Peace

© 2010 Ann Voskamp

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