Build a Home

that your feet may leave...

"Home is not in monetary things, but like heaven, home is peace." - from “Finding Home”

The first published story I ever wrote came long after my high school English class full of tales and poetry, or the mom-journaling after a painful first birth, and scattered Haikus on the socials.

My first story came as a supernatural hint that there was something more to my life than the frozen state it was drowning in during May of 2020. In reflection, God’s story for me, was never over and the story of “Finding Home” would become the point of which I would dive into a world unknown and foreign. But was it? Was “home” something that had always lived within my bones unable to cling to it’s inanimate obstacles?

As I sit here January 19th 2025, gently tapping the keys, a long way from the pounding past, I have come full circle to finding home. It’s meaning may escape us most days, yet God knows no limits on His patience to see us through.

It would be a beautiful Saturday, May 23rd, 2020, sitting in the garden, uprooted from family and my career, that I would stare into nothing wondering if I could go forward. Was I the black, gray or green can? My phone would ting with a random text message from a beautiful woman that I barely knew. What I did know about her was that she was a writer and I had previously worked with her daughters in different aspects of my photography career. From family portraits, an engagement, wedding, maternity shoot, to mentoring both girls in photography.

She suggested I submit something to an online Christian artist’s-encouraged magazine. My acquaintance had no idea what I was going through. She did not know I wanted to die and that I was rotting inside, unable to speak to my husband, my lifelong confidant.

That day, with the sun beating on my face, all of my blessed life behind me, I took pen to paper and wrote this piece about “home.” I felt destroyed to my 22 year career in photography, (that I considered a ministry to others), so figured with nothing in my heart left to loose, I would write something. The writer that I wasn’t.

A month later it would be published. The exact same day we would be uninvited to a family event. I never saw anything in it except for my hurting heart. It did not lead me down a path to home. Or did it?

Two years after “Finding Home,” in May of 2022, I would sit in the kitchen to write my first published story on Substack. About an old home.

In May of 2025 it will be five years. I recently wrote a piece, “I Held Your Hand,” about building a home, from a song I heard. In fact, there is a series dedicated to a few of our homes. To elaborate, this is what “home” truly means to me...

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Home is the heartbeat of your mind vesseling everything it carries out into the universe and beyond. When home is absent or fallen ash, it still lives on. We carry home throughout our days and we have the ability to say, “I had that. I had these people, those things, the sunstruck painted walls, music, love, tragedy. I had them all. I have them all.

For the restless tears staining the earth around my feet, I learned the stripped-down nature of God's intentions.

Gratitude for what was and what is.

I trusted that following God through the forest of His creation, every single ounce of it, from the minuscule worker cells inside my body to the ominous blue whale gliding through His vast oceans and all of existence, was a deeply humbling offering I have never deserved. How could I let go of the visceral energy all around that would elevate me home?

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?

- Matthew 6:26

Home is in the dandelion of one hundred and fifty fluffy seeds, windblown mini parachutes of perfect purpose, drifting, landing exactly where they are meant to be. Nectar for butterflies, bees and other insects.

We, are where we’re meant to be.

Home is in noticing the weak and abandoned. It's in the faithful and faith against all odds. Home is ashen blurred polaroids, blackened edges of love letters, stored in the heart. It’s in treasures touched, placed on fingers or shelves, passed down and gathered up in the soft wind of remembrance. It’s the ocean breeze of days gone by, lyrics and notes scattered along life’s path. Home deep within.

Home is running full speed into your loved ones arms. It's a tight hug from a stranger. A celestial touch never forgotten.

Home is Holy. It is His purpose waiting behind layers of porous clay, ready to mold us until the day we are home. He is never done with us.

Home is the unique thinking mind who jumps off the track of man's presumptions for him and finds him/herself.

Home is the theater of our lives and the cold reality of the valley floor.

Home is your beating heart, inhaled, exhaled breath, at the top of your mountain, saying "I did it."

Home is in hellos and goodbyes. Once embraced, once gone. But not forever.

Home is the quiet discernment of our truth versus His.

Most of all home is a Love Lamp woven into our life tapestry. His patient torch in the dark and joyful Light in our blessings. Home is at His table.

Homeward bound.

The prospect to seize love over hate, forgiveness over judgement, hope versus despair, faith versus self, joy over misery, grief wedded to gratitude, all in symphony with each other.

To let go. To grow.

To wonder, wander and watch your story unfold as it should. He can do anything within the walls of His universe including the rebuilding of home in your heart.

As a child my feet left another country for my dad's American dream. I craved the solid tangible walls and my family back home.

Now I know the art of home. It is not in concrete, brick and mortar, reliance and security of others. The art of building a home is in the heavenly music, our faith in God, that our greatness is dependent on our trust in Him, our responsibility of character and the way we leave His world a little better than we found it...

“Limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns. It calls me on and on across the universe.” - Across the Universe, The Beatles

“Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” - Matthew 6:19-21

The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can't supply is proof that Heaven must be our home. - C.S. Lewis

*all images are from my home on 1/18/25