There’s simply no place like home. What if the biggest component of finding, building, and making a home is not so much about the building itself, but with the people living within? Coming home says more about us and the person we became while abroad than it says about the place we call home. Home, an often-static environment, is the best rubric to gauge exactly how we’ve changed and grown as people.

When my house becomes an accurate reflection of my soul, it becomes a tangible expression of my love and care for others. To invite you into my home is then to invite you into my heart and wrap you in the warmest of hugs. Such an act says, here I am, in all my mess and glory, and I offer it all to you in friendship. What I have is yours and I would love to meet your needs, care for your heart even as you have cared for mine. This is the gift of true hospitality and friendship.

Heaven has long been associated with an eternal home: a place of beauty, joy and love where all things experience complete healing and ultimate connectedness. Home and heaven are intertwined longings because they represent the same desire: a place to belong. The existence of heaven may be up for debate—depending on what you believe about life after death (or a lack thereof)—but we all have the potential to create homes for ourselves here and now.

Burn out may just be our greatest gift, our saving grace. It may be the one thing powerful enough to awaken us from the stupor & routine of our days, motivating us to change for the better. Burn out reveals a lack of balance & health, helping us realize we are not walking in the most powerful, beautiful, or generous versions of ourselves. Burn out won’t allow us to continue living the way we once did because it forces us to come to grips with our insufficiencies & redirect our energy towards more life-giving things in the long run.

Grief, what have you done?

Murdering me on a cross of sorrows I cannot bear

You pierce me, haunt me, stalk me

Tie me up & pin me down,

Struggling under your dreaded weight

To whom or what do you ascribe supreme importance in your life? What makes your drum beat, pulse race, ears tingle, or soul stir? What is the one thing you will go to your grave defending, the topic brought up at family gatherings that makes you cringe or riles you up? What do you accept as true or real to the point of trusting it with your life?

Is not the privilege of vulnerability that I get to undress my heart before you & you before me, my body too if you’ll let me? To be seen by each other the way the Divine sees & knows us, to be wrapped in the embrace of eternal connection. This is the wonder of connection & intimacy…somehow by sharing it with one another we return to the heart of perfect love.

For delight is a choice in the heart of each child

That adulthood over heavy years has long since defiled

The way back to wonder, she tells me, is free

All I must do is make delight a home in me

I was humbled by a force I had never allowed to impact me. Beauty asks no permission; she simply is. She is an undeniable force, beckoning the viewer to pause & worship, to savor & ponder, to be filled with awe & ecstasy. She demands our fealty, strengthening our desire for the good, pure, true & lovely. She stands boldly before evil, demanding it bow its knee in submission to her quiet authority. Beauty invites us to learn from her wisdom. She is not forceful; she simply exists.

My body is no trivial track for boys to simply ride on & hold…

I am a banquet table; a feast that is prepared but yet to be enjoyed

How sad to have mastered the art of cooking

With no one to savor the spread

I am wild, I am free; I taste of sweat and sun…

Of the wild & the fierce…can’t you smell it? Won’t you come?

“Just one bite” is a dangerous game…you’ll soon be back for more.