"What is Home?" and Other Musings
February 2024: A letter for people who have something to steward.
Dear family, friends, and Internet strangers,
One of the major themes of the novel I’ve been writing is the idea of “home”, and what it means to be home. Is “home” just the house or apartment you go back to? If you leave your home country, can you make a new home in the new place, or will “home” always be the place you left behind?
We use “home” to mean a lot of things. I might click “home” on a website to get back to the main page, or be sent back to the “home” square while playing a frustrating style of board game. I say “Let’s go home” when we travel, but I mean the Airbnb or hotel we’re using as a home base for a few days.
When I move, I try to start calling where I live “home” right away in order to normalize my new living situation. “Home” was the word I used when I rented a room in someone’s house for three months. When Ed and I left Florida for Indiana, we left home to go home.
Other people say they’re “going home” for Christmas when they visit family in another town, though they’ve lived in their current place for years. It’s the word for the place they’re from. Do such people consider their current town or city home, too?
I find the conversation interesting. I can’t say I have a strong sense of the word “home”.
My family moved from Connecticut when I was ten years old, which is a really weird age to move. I never feel like I can say I “grew up” someplace in particular, since the moving was right in the middle of the growing-up years.
Living in Florida, I used the word “home” for the house we lived in, and I believe I accepted the demonym “Floridian”, but if I called the state itself “home”, it was a shadow of what I wanted that word to mean. In short, I wanted to leave, but I lived there.
At times, I was angry at the birds for not being the birds of the northern states, angry at tropical plants for not being tulips or daffodils, angry at palm trees for not being spruces or maples or something I recognized from the north, something that didn’t look like a gigantic toilet brush. I missed winter and true seasons.
I did not notice the northern birds that migrated to Florida, or those that shared its range year-round. I did not notice the seasons that Florida does have, when things bloom and when things fade.
I was in Florida for 16 years, unable—or unwilling—to plant roots in its sandy ground.
I wonder what it’s like for people who grew up moving from state to state or nation to nation.
At the end of 2015, less than a year after getting married, Ed and I moved to Indiana. I finally feel like I’m home here, though to call myself a Hoosier seems an absurdity.
Moreover, even this must be temporary.
Whether we eventually move away or not, as Christians, we hold this home lightly. We steward it, caring for it and maintaining it and trying to keep it reasonably beautiful, but it’s not our home forever.
On the stewardship side, I want to be someone who cares not just for the house we own, but for whatever is in my power and authority in the wider region I now call “home”. I could pick up litter on a walk, I can vote as responsibly as possible, I can be kind to people, I can engage fully when I’m called in for jury duty, I can act when I see something and not turn away.
At the house level, maintenance is important, without falling into the HGTV/Pinterest trap. Ed and I recently started planning to renovate our master bathroom, something we’ve wanted to do since we moved here 8 years ago. We want to make it more usable, and I want it to be more beautiful and peaceful (e.g., no more orange paint).
But even that is only stewardship, taking care of that which Someone Else ultimately owns. The house we call “home” continues to be a gift from God that we receive joyfully, yet we cannot keep it forever.
“For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” - 2 Corinthians 5:1 (ESV)
I know that eternity with God Himself is my true home, and when I am with God, I am home enough. It stands to reason, in my mind, that if “being a neighbor” is based less on geography and more on whether one chooses to act with Godly mercy, as in Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan, then what makes a place “home”, in the sense of being a place you take care of, may be based less on the personal feeling of investment in the place and more on whether that’s where God has put a person.
Our church is about to undergo significant renovation in the name of stewardship. Our church also knows this may stay only a rental space, not a building the church owns (though we pray that changes), and we are willing to steward it anyway.
It echoes something the Apostle Paul wrote in his second letter to the church at Corinth, in a different context. He spoke of being either “at home in the body” and “away from the Lord”, or vice versa, “away from the body and at home with the Lord.” He wrapped that up neatly with this:
“So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him.” - 2 Corinthians 5:9 (ESV)
Really, that’s the point. Not “what is home?” but “how do I live wherever I am?”
Before I left Florida, I began to feel like I was in a Chinese finger trap, like the more I tried to get away, the more stuck I was. I had a sense God did not want me to see His creation as inferior simply because it wasn’t what I wanted.
So, I learned to love some things about Florida, to look for good things. (I already loved people in the area, but I saw them as beside the point; people can theoretically move.) I remember noticing, maybe for the first time, the pleasant rustle of a palm tree when the wind blows through its leaves. I remember accepting (to some degree) that perhaps I would be in Florida for a while, and God got to decide, not me alone.
I don’t think I was there long enough after that to really lean into the stewardship I’m talking about, but accepting where I was would have been the first step.
Now when we visit Florida, I appreciate the water birds and tropical flowers and ocean air, without wishing Indiana were Florida or vice versa. I hope I can fully engage with the place God has placed me, wherever I am, however long I’m there, whether it’s a pleasant place or not.
Wherever my earthly home is, I make it my aim to please God. Sometimes I miss, sometimes I forget to aim, but that’s the point—He is the point.
In the novel I’m writing, it ultimately comes back to the same thing. “What is home?” remains a question, but it inevitably leads to, “How do you live, wherever you are?”
Links I Liked This Month
Blessing Your Enemies - Let’s Be Real
With politics ramping up in the news, I love any reminder that we’re not called, as believers in Christ, to be cruel to people. Quite the opposite.
My friend Tina Marie Cox published a post about a month ago about blessing our enemies, not in some “clever” gotcha-style way, but a legitimate blessing: “Blessing Enemies”, Let’s Be Real, 23 January 2024.
It’s reasonable to apply that to anyone we are tempted to treat as enemies, including political opponents or even perceived oppressors.
The Effects of Predictive Text on Output
An article in The Atlantic last month linked to two Harvard studies that support the point I made in my December post, “The Medium, the Message, and You”, re: predictive text, ChatGPT, and the way the medium we use to craft a message affects the message itself:
Authors Kenneth C. Arnold, Krysta Chauncey, and Krzysztof Z. Gajos, “Sentiment Bias in Predictive Text Recommendations Results in Biased Writing”, published in Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2018, May 2018.
Same authors, “Predictive Text Encourages Predictable Writing”, published in IUI '20: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, March 2020.
This paragraph from the earlier of the two papers is of particular interest: “This effect has ethical implications. If the systems we use encourage us to create certain kinds of artifacts rather than others, what autonomy are we ceding in exchange for efficiency? If it becomes extremely easy to write something in favor of a government or corporation but laborious to write something critical, is our speech really free?”
I recommend at least skimming one of the PDFs if the topic interests you.
Writing Updates
I’ve finished a draft of one chapter of my novel. I’m finding writing in the evening is helping me make progress.
Also, two lovely people I know have asked me to write guest posts for their websites, so expect to see those in the coming months, as I plan to share links to them here when they’re done.
That’s it for this February! If any of this was valuable to you—interesting, useful, or beautiful—share it with someone:
To truth, love, and adventure,
Rae
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