By Mark Briggs
here she stood amidst the piles of charred wood and broken bricks. Thin lines of ascending smoke whispered again, a reminder of the desolation that a fire can bring to a household. Her innocent six-year-old eyes puddled with un-spilled tears as the camera came in for a close-up. The wisdom of Aristotle and Plato couldn’t have been more profound as she pulled from deep within an answer to a most challenging question: “What will you and your family do now that you have no home?” the news reporter asked. “Oh, we have a home,” she said. “We just don’t have a house to put it in.”
This little girl knew well what we all should learn: A house is built, but a home is made.
In 1943 after much devastation brought on by the war, Winston Churchill made a speech relative to rebuilding the House of Commons. He said, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us.”
It’s true! Our buildings do shape us. However, we must first shape our buildings. The simplest way to shape our home is with our sentiments. Sentiments are ideas colored by emotion. Sentiments are attitudes or particular thoughts or judgments prompted by feelings.
For a healthy home, you need both structure and sentiment. For instance, if your house has become a home, you cannot separate the sofa from your memories of family movie night. You can’t just see the staircase without seeing your daughter descending it on her wedding day. You can never sit by the fire and only be warmed, because each crackle and pop reminds you of every story (true or false) told by Grandpa. Fresh paint cannot mask the original pink that was on the walls the day you brought home that seven-pound bundle of joy. The sound of your garage door, the hum of your air conditioner, the squeaky back door that the kids swear got louder after curfew are all things that work together to make your house into your home.
Often our home is a microcosm of a much larger community of unity; a unity of walls, floors, design, decoration, space, and, not least, the sentiments of all of those occupying the space. Our home can provide a premise to live a healthy and wholesome life if established with wisdom. It becomes a template or pattern of how things can work in our “big world.” A unity of things must take place at their lowest possible common denominator. If we are to build a better world, we must start with building a better home.
“By wisdom, a house is built, and by understanding it is established; by knowledge the rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures.” Proverbs 24:3-4