UN Habitat Day: Is Your House a Home?

Is your House a Home?  I ask this question in honor of UN World Habitat day (details here).

To truly understand homelessness you must first understand what “home” is.  To understand home you must first be sure that you too are not homeless.  Let me tell you a little about me to help us understand the concept of home.

 

On September 22^nd my wife Tricia and I celebrated 25 years of marriage.  We have also lived in the same home for those 25 years here in West Lake Hills part of the Austin, Texas metropolitan area.  During those 25 years we have had four children of our own and a niece that we were blessed to raise.  Our family has never moved.  During these 25 years we have been a member of the same church community and our children all attended the same schools.  Many even shared some of the same teachers.  Our family was involved in scouting, sports and many other extra-curricular activities that rooted us into our community.  It is virtually impossible to go anywhere in our community without running into someone we know from these 25 years of being deeply rooted in this community.  For us it is H-O-M-E.

 

Recently, we floated a trial balloon to our kids that we might be interested in selling our home; that perhaps God was calling us into a different direction.  Well…you would have thought Armageddon had come!  We were witnessing the beginnings of the Mutiny on the Bounty!  The kids were not only infuriated but they rejected this “call” outright.  What ensued was a wonderful conversation of us travelling down memory lane and all that had happened in our home over these many years.  We began to realize that the mortar that held the bricks of our home together were the stories and memories that flowed from our home over these many years.  To pull this very deep tap root from the ground would render us homeless.

 

Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian Walsh in their groundbreaking book Beyond Homelessness talked about the phenomenology of home and listed eight characteristics that made up home.  These eight characteristics of home are:

1.       Home is a place of permanence

2.       Home is a dwelling place

3.       Home is a storied place

4.       Home is a safe resting place

5.       Home is a place of hospitality

6.       Home is a place of embodied inhabitation

7.       Home is a place of orientation

8.       Home is a place of affiliation and belonging

 

To understand homelessness we must first understand what H-O-M-E really is and understanding this will uncover that many of us, even though adequately and perhaps richly housed, are too homeless.