WHAT MAKES A HOME?

Our neighbors of twelve years just moved. After many days of packing, moving and house touch-up, their house is empty. The garbage men hauled away the last of the leftovers, the realtor placed a "For Sale" sign on the lawn, and their former home is ready for a new resident.

Their home is a little ranch with finished basement, and like ours, smaller than most around here. Yet they raised five children during their twenty-five years there. As the original owners when the house was new, their time was unusually long by today's standards.

I've often thought what it takes to make a home. It's certainly more than size, shape and usefulness of a building. So many homes today are large for the amount of people in them. Carol and I have lived in our home next door for twelve years, the longest I've lived in any one place. That means I've moved a lot, and also that we like it here.

Making a home is a blessing, but losing a home can be devastating. This past week we saw the loss of 480 homes in the Black Forest fire about forty miles south of here, and it made us contemplate the value of our own home. To lose a home through divorce or financial reversal is also devastating.

How many rooms do you have in your house? Jesus once said, "In my Father's house are many rooms, [and] I am going there to prepare a place for you." (John 14:2) How many of those rooms do you live in?

It's estimated that regardless of a house's size, people usually live in about one thousand square feet of its space. I have an idea our neighbor's five children and parents lived in every square inch of their home. They were very good neighbors, and we shall miss them.

I was born and grew up in a house that was probably purchased as a kit. It was there when Mom and Dad bought it in 1937 and was the exact replica of one we saw in a 1909 Sears Roebuck catalog. Mom and Dad lived there forty years, and is still standing today, but just barely.

More important than how many rooms we have is whether or not we will be in our Father's House when our time of departure comes. Believers will be there, not because of the goodness of their lives, but because of Christ's perfect life and death and His promise that all who trust and have faith in Him will have eternal life in our Father's House.

What a houseful of children our Father will have then!