When we married, we brought with us two different experiences of home. Mandy comes from a family in which her parents are divorced, and Dave’s parents are still happily married. Mandy is an only-child, and Dave is the eldest of three, with two younger sisters. As you can imagine, these differences, as well as many others, have shaped our expectations about what “home is.”
In the present, our sense of home is often defined and shaped by the many little acts of tedium that create a family life - who will take out the trash? who will do the dishes this time? who cooks? who mows the grass? who wakes up with the kids in the middle of the night? and on an on..becoming more holy in our search to find worth amid those small tasks; joy in the labor of being home to one another.
But we are equally in the gravitational pull of a future home whose quality of life guides us forward, a home where the restless find rest, the stranger finds a name, and the hurting find healing. With the stories we carry, the small unnoticed acts we perform, and the various lives we are learning to welcome in, we continue to crawl toward that blessed light.
Inspired by an idea she had seen on Pinterest (who isn’t, these days?), Mandy posed the possibility of taking one of the walls in our living room and creating an ever-changing work of art. We would use paint-pens to write or draw what the word Home means to us, and to anyone else in our community.
Rather than just name home, we wanted to create home. With that in mind, we invited over three good friends who had been experiencing the confusion and pain of their own troubled homes for a sleep-over. If nothing else, we wanted them to know that their homes were more than just the houses where they had experienced division, dissension, and doubt. That their homes extended beyond blood into the deeper waters of baptism. That they would always be a part of our family and they would always share a home with us.
That evening, in the midst of the lifelong work of homemaking, we began the much less arduous journey of creating a testimony to the many senses of home that are shaping our own. One by one, each hand added their own domestically-existential signature, creating the kind of home that can only be crafted through the diversity of penstrokes that grace our wall and our lives even now.
Our wall has now become a reflection of the home we’ve made and the home we’re still striving to make - graced by the fingerprints of so many stories that are blending into a beautiful mosaic, the many colors bleeding into one. Our home is full of mistakes that are embraced rather than scorned, full of pretentiousness that has room to be laughed at, and full of longings that we are living into together.
And it’s more than a wall; it’s a foundation.
Mandy and Dave McNeely live in Jefferson City, TN, where they spend their days welcoming God's Kingdom through their two beautiful boys, their teaching, their dancing (well, her dancing), and their attempts to love the person in front of them at any given moment.
I love that Bethany is on your wall too!
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