Live Well

The Lifegiving Home

November 8, 2025

I guess it’s part of growing up. The feeling that you’ve lost your home.

Mine was a hard one to lose. Full of play, freshly baked bread, read-alouds and sacred memories. Best, you knew the people you loved would be there.

I had the only upstairs room. At night the wind whipped through the valley and shook our home, targeting my bedroom. I learned to trust those walls. I’d wake to the battering then sleep again soundly. I felt awe at the might of something so outside of my control. I didn’t mind it because I knew I was safe.

I lived at home through college so my grand adventures lasted less than a day. I still had a homemade meal and people I loved waiting for me. Life was not perfect, but it was very good.

Then we moved. But I had a plan. I did not want to be homesick. I chose to move with my family. I was so desperate to separate a house from a home that I didn’t see what was happening. I really was losing my home. Not just the house, mind you. But the season of life when I was under a roof where things would happen predictably as they always had.

The wind came inside.

I married and left and I think I’ve been missing home ever since.

So determined was my quest to associate home with people and not a place that I never processed any of this. I doubled down on my efforts to stay connected to the people of my home and put minimal effort into building my own home.

Now I have a house with a husband and three little ones that fill it. For years, I poured my effort into minimizing mess to make room for the people. But I took no care to fill it with things that make a home.

See, I committed that common Christian mistake. I undervalued the physical. I forgot that humans are embodied and that physical spaces form us.

But Instagram kept showing me pictures of women in aprons pulling freshly baked bread from the oven. Beautiful spaces with the perfect amount of mess. Homemaking assaulted me even while I dreaded cooking. Instagram is only after my attention, so why did my eyes linger on these images? Why did I not feel any better after pinteresting the perfect apron?

It made me curious. So like I do, I read a book, The Lifegiving Home. Its incessant focus on the physical made me cry. I was raised in a lifegiving home. But as happens with so many childhood treasures, I grew up and lost it. I did not realize it was my grown up job to build my own lifegiving home.

13 years in, my windows finally have curtains and maybe now I like art? I’ve always had an eye for beauty and love arranging spaces. Don’t get me wrong, many of the rooms in my home look intentional and beautiful. But I held my heart back from the process. I approached it practically, certainly not spiritually.

The Lifegiving Home changed that. It helped me see my childhood home. Made me realize that leaving it was natural, but that doesn’t lessen its loss. It was ok to be sad. No, it was important. Courage to grieve is the soil of hope.

So I’ve been homesick. Not for the people. Gratefully, they never left. But for the place and time when I was a child. When the wind was outside and everything I was facing could be solved by going downstairs to enjoy apple crisp with the people who loved me most.

It’s crazy how long it took me to hang those curtains (I mean, I paid someone to do it. It took little of my time. It took me long to decide to do it.).

I cried many tears writing this. Cheyne walked in and it was full-blown awkward explaining to my husband of 14 years that I was writing about how I was homesick. But there it is.

Now I am truly excited to build my own lifegiving home. It is a sacred work. I know it because I read the book but also because of how homesick I feel.

Homesick is probably the most spiritual of feelings a Christian can sit in. It’s one we should know inside and out. As the winds of life take what is secure, homesick is exactly what we should feel.

The building of a beautiful home is a sacred, creative act that helps us value what is good. One day, I pray my children will feel homesick. That they’ll long to see those curtains. That Cheyne and I will have built a home worth crying over losing. That it taught them to reach for what is good and ache when it is beyond.

For years I held the ache off, feeling it was distraction from gratitude for what I have now. But now I understand. I can miss what I had because it planted in me a desire for something greater. And as I let my heart fully feel it, the Holy Spirit channels that desire into an even deeper hunger for home.

The one where He is now, getting it ready for me.

All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. Hebrews 11:13-16

When someone once asked me just what it was that my parents did that made me believe in God, without even thinking I said, “I think it was French toast on Saturday mornings and coffee and Celtic music and discussions and candlelight in the evenings . . .” Because in those moments I tasted and saw the goodness of God in a way I couldn’t ignore. Sarah Clarkson The Lifegiving Home