It is waking up on an average Saturday to the smell of cinnamon rolls waking you up because your eye lids open. It is the sound of laughter when your toddler makes the weirdest statement, it is the tears dripping on your kitchen table with joyful news and news that will break your heart into a million pieces. It is watching your dog become a senior from when you have had him since a puppy. Home is more than 4 walls. What if I told you home is where your heart is?
Sometimes our hearts can be so loud, so noisy we forget to slow down even in our home life. To make a house into a home to have a touch of love that someone to walk in says this is a home not just a house.
What you pour heart into people will notice. Not merely so the home you dwell in, where you rest your head to lay at night but what about your heart?
Do you let people in, do you rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn to those who mourn? Do you feel and show people your heart can be a home.
When I think of the word home I think of the word Hospitality, I remember when I was little I would think that word meant hospital maybe in a small sense it does, it means bringing people into your home and letting their wounds be vulnerable. It means to let a stranger have a place at your table being welcomed with all they carry and saying you are not alone in this welcome to my home where you will always have a seat at my table. I will feed you not to only nourish your physical needs but also your spiritual needs. I will pour into as I have been poured into.
Where your tears matter, your stories matter and who you are as a person matter. I have always loved this song "Crowded Table- The Highwomen" Take a listen one of the core lyrics "I want a crowded table
"I want a house with a crowded table, and a place by the fire for everyone. Let us take on the world while we are young and able, and bring us back together when the day is done. If we want a garden we are going to have to sow the seeds, plant a little happiness and let the roots grow deep. If it is love that we give then it is love that we will reap."
Too many people now a days don't even know there next door neighbor. With my most recent move I have been able to get the pleasure of knowing my next door neighbor, we have usually 2 hour conversations weekly. Home isn't found in an electronic device, home is found in your heart, intentionally building community, intentionally showing people they have a seat at your table.
I want to show people my table is open, I want my table to be welcoming, where no one has to put a fake face on at a seat in my home. I want my home to reflect my heart. Because the heart is the truest home. It doesn't matter if you are in the cold winters of Idaho, or the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, or the desert air in Tri Cities WA. What matters is your heart is it a place of home for others, or are they met with coldness, isolation and no one enters.
When I think of home too, I do think of my Grandma Basehore: I don't think there is a day that hasn't gone by that I don't miss her and wish I could hear her voice one last time. My Grandma Basehore during the lifespan of my life lived in two houses but that isn't what made it a home it was truly the heart of my grandma, it was the smell of her coffeecake, it was the love she poured into me as her granddaughter. It was the deep conversations from Jesus, to stories of her in the navy, to stories of her growing up, her college years, her prayers. Just being with her even sitting in silence just holding her hand. Singing and playing piano for her. Her teaching me to bake. Laughing together and a few tears together. Most important I will never forget how welcomed I felt there. I want to leave that legacy not some grand one where millions of people remember my name but a simple matter. Simple Hospitality knowing every one has a seat at my table.
Because isn't that what Jesus did? He brought the people society forgot, people that the world say you will never go far. Yet they did leave a legacy, even if it was quiet and simple. Jesus was home to many who were orphans. Orphans are those who don't have a home. Yet Jesus sees them and picks them up and says welcome home.
I don't ever want my heart to not be a home to people. You never know what kind of "house" a person grew up with and many smiles are a facade to what really happened in the house they grew up in whether they had to grow up to fast, or endured things no child should ever endured, or grew up crying in fetal position in the closet, because that house didn't feel safe.
I have learned deeply in this life that you have to choose to make your heart a home, you have to choose daily to rise above your pain, to let people have a seat at your table. The more you let your past, your trauma, your pain from the house you grew up in shut people out you will end up alone, you will end up with not a single person sitting at your table, and in the end it will be all your fault for not letting people in. It will be no one to blame but you. Any trauma you endured was never ever your fault however the healing is. Healing is your responsibility, to help you make your heart into a home. To let people see.
See the beautiful think about vulnerability, is that when you open your heart to let someone have a seat at your table they will open up too. Home is a place some people will never experience in a life time so why not create that home for someone? Be brave take a step... Invite them over. I get that "Oh I have social anxiety" I get that more than you realize. But sometimes the best way to over come social anxiety is having a seat at someone's table.
I will never ever forget my mentors I had in my life they lived by that motto, if you are blessed build a longer table not a taller fence...
I want my life to reflect that I want people to have a home that may have never had a home, to be fed a nourishing meal, to laugh, to encourage and yes maybe a few tears will be shed, to be a family to those who don't have a family.
To my beloved readers, you will always have a seat at my table.
with love
Makayla Chalee
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