Belonging and Mental HealthSample

Making Homes for One Another

“It’s so nice you’re home!” Every time I hear this, I want to run. People assume that when I go back to my home country, I go somewhere I belong. But home for me is a complicated place. It’s a place of trauma, pain, and sadness—one that I desperately wished to escape. I don’t belong “at home.” Rather, “home” is somewhere else.

In some ways, I have many homes: the physical place where I live with the two people closest to me; these people themselves, people I work with who have become friends, friends who welcome me into their lives. Ultimately, home is when I don’t have to explain myself and where I know people love me, even on a bad day.

Home is also a way of being. It isn’t perfect. I don’t need everyone to say the right thing to experience home with them. And they don’t need me to be perfect, either. Belonging means being able to be human—fallible, frail, and vulnerable. You can’t have home without love, and you can’t have love without forgiveness.

This can be really hard. We want to be accepted as we are, but sometimes, we’re not ready to accept others as they are. We want more, or better, from them. Creating home and belonging takes grace and the ability to live with the fact that we all struggle in different ways—whether with physical health, mental health challenges, life circumstances, or our shortcomings in loving one another.

I love Jesus’ talk of home and house. He shares how we may find and inhabit a space of complete belonging in John 14:2. I like this—there is belonging in God’s house, but there is privacy, too! Belonging isn’t the same as crowding. Belonging allows space for others to be themselves, for me to be myself, and for us to meet well.

But Jesus doesn’t stop there. Home is more than this. True home and belonging come when we are gathered together around the One who chooses to make a home with and for us (John 14:23).

Reflection Questions: Who makes you feel at home? How do you enable others to be at home in the places where you yourself belong?

Prayer: May the God who chose to make his home with us be welcome among us, and may we who are his children make a home with one another—with grace, forgiveness, and laughter—where all are welcomed, and none are left at the door. Amen.

(Written by Isabelle Hamley.)