Home Things

 Home is the place the family lands at the end of the day. It's our safe place. It's where we rest and rejuvenate. 
Home is where the family belongs without question. We can always come back home or go back home. 
Home is where the family lives. We tell each other about our day at work. We laugh about the things that are funny to us, together. We understand each others' opinions. We help each other to decompress when the day was hard to do. We solve with each other. 
  Happiness at home is a choice just as keeping a clean, orderly home is a choice. None of these things happen by default. Everyone has to work on both to make it happen. 

  Our table just now is sporting this beautiful runner that Lisl made and sent to us from Thailand. She painted the birds and attached the lace to a long piece of lovely linen. I am treasuring this by using it. The birds Salt and Pepper shaker set is from Francis and I am pretty sure it was Francis who made the buttons, too. 
  The pitcher is Amy's find from our favorite used shop in Seward, I think. 
   Home is the best place to create beauty and share it, too.

Lisl, I have been thinking hard about your problem of wondering how to feel at home while you live on two sides of the globe by turns. Here's a messy list of thoughts to ponder.

~ The Stonehouse is home in some way or other to our whole family. You each have invested in this place by belonging and living here and by enjoying our family together here for parts of thirty years. 
~ I would love to be able to say that home will always be here, but that would be false. Home is here only as long as WE are here. It's possible that in one generation, this home will only be a memory. In another, just lore. We have no continuing city.
~ But we seek one to come. And we transfer our home feelings to heaven as we get older. It seems far away and unreal but that will change, I promise.
~ Keep a few treasures to grace each and every house you live in like Laura Ingall's mother did. We all need a china shepherdess, after all. It provides for an on-the-spot piece of the familiar when we need it in a strange land. 
~ With communications as they are, the whole globe is home, in a sense. Besides, where can we flee from His presence? And there is prayer with which to touch each other no matter how far apart we are geographically. 
~ I can't wait to bless you and yours in your Thailand home as you have blessed us in our stateside homes. It's all just preparation for the mansions in the end. This effort to beautify our surroundings is worship and hope of the Home above. Let's give it our best.