Becoming Home - For Bigger and for Smaller

In a vocation that involves being tied to a home for a substantial period of the day, I've started to think about these houses that we live in. When do we cross the line from a house to a home? When does a home become my home? Better yet, when do our homes become part of our larger home - the church?

Before our first child was born, I was writing my college thesis, working in the admission office on campus, and a TA. Sure we lived in an apartment in the evenings and weekends, but there was not a big effort, on my part, to make it a home. It was more of a utilitarian place to eat and rest.

This is not to say that someone wasn't finding pretty things for the house and settling in. My husband was a grad student then with time during the day, and he is a champion thrift store shopper. He found many of the things that we still use in our home. The difference was I wasn't really participating in the making of home. For me, physical creation is an important part of feeling connected to a place. I need to do something in order to feel part of it.

I feel much the same way about our larger home of church. I can regularly go to mass and say hi to people at coffee hour, but if I am not participating in a physical doing for the parish, then I feel less connected and less at home.

I need all the aspects of my life to talk to each other. Church does not belong in a box over there, husband over there, kids over there, hobbies over there. They all exist under the one roof of my life, just as I exist under the one roof of the Church. I try to have the doing off all of these areas happen together and simultaneously as much as possible. This blog is largely about the successes, abysmal failures, and hilarity that can ensure when we try to live under God's roof.