I was reading a tweet from @scarymommy about memories of a house is not a home. It made me think of the song “a house is not a home” etc. etc. made famous by Luther Vandross or Burt Bacharach, Dionne Warwick. But it made me think of a multi-Grammy winner band Morgan Heritage.
Reggae category: Morgan Heritage. They never do anything without talking about how much they love and respect their father. They are a family of five adult children of reggae artist Denroy Morgan. All they say is we are a movement. A family. They never talk about their achievements without their family.
Like you said @scaryMommy “the house will never be as important as the home”.
I think I started travelling when I was 16 years old. I mean leaving my house and family and going overseas. This, after growing up with a father whose job carried him from place to place. He never left his family behind.
When I was in a strange place all I had to do when I might be upset or apprehensive was to think about was “what would Mom be doing right now”? Talking with others about who you were, you could always remember a story about something funny that happened in your home. Think about it for a second. Why is a house not a home? Like when the 12 year old dog that we had came and told everyone GoodBye , walked down the steps on the verandah and we never saw her again.
That’s why a house is not a home. Home makes us think of family. Family is hard to define but I think more than a thing, it has a function. One very important role is helping you to decide how to define the world around you. There will be challenges and it might end up quite different from what everyone expected. But having family is always a very effective and useful starting point.
So since we have to live somewhere, we live in a house. We have responsibilities in that house. We put things in that house. We like to have somewhere to return to. But we can sell that house, as hard as it may be. Especially when those who we want to remember are not there.
I think the best way to look at this is learning from Proverbs.
Proverbs 24:3-4 – “By wisdom a house is built, and by understanding it is established; by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches.”
If we go to ancient Egypt, the home of language long before the civilizations we now acknowledge, houses were made of red brick from the desert mixed with grass and water. Usually impenetrable. These houses were used for shelter, protection, a place to worship, to eat, gather and welcome others. We only see words for a house.
A house is a place. The home, on the other hand, is the people with all their emotions, feelings, who are inside that place. They may be similar but they are different. That house and home. To me those riches of Proverbs 24, are what makes a house a home.
One Love