News The Eight O’Clock
March 2014
8 am Service, Christ Church, Richmond Road, Kenilworth
Home, Sweet Home Many of you remark on my travel articles but I can assure you that I am equally happy spending time at home. At the beginning of January, I moved house after having been 20 years in the same home, only the second place since I turned six. It was an exhausting task of packing up, sorting, de-cluttering and decisionmaking. However, at the start of the process that began out of an unpleasant security incident, I asked God for His guidance and blessing on the plans that I wished to bring to fruition. While packing up I came across a heart-shaped fretwork-framed photograph of my paternal grandparents that my father had made. My father, who went home to Jesus before I was old enough to know him, appeared to have valued his home so much that he made this frame for his parents’ photographs and ‘Home Sweet Home’ was carved into the frame. Rather kitsch some might say, but in keeping with what I have been told about him, a man of great sensitivity who knew what was important in life. As I packed up, memories flooded back of my childhood home and I knew that it was best to focus on what was ahead, the excitement of my new home awaiting me. Sam Ewing wrote: ‘When you finally go back to your old home, you find that it wasn’t the old home that you missed but your childhood’. So, as with my previous two homes, it will be my childhood and early adulthood. ‘Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You’ll find what you need to furnish it—memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey’. Tad Williams could have written this for me! So in packing up, I also found that I was able to let go of things that I moved with 20 years ago from my childhood home. The memories had solidified and March 2014 Eight O’Clock News
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found a special settled place and it was with joy that I had my nieces choose special pieces that had belonged to my mom. I now knew that although things carried memories of her, she was rather to be remembered in the words of Stephen Covey: ‘When it comes to developing character strength, inner security and unique personal and interpersonal talents as a child, no institution can or ever will compare with, or effectively substitute for, the home’s potential for positive influence’. Finally, at 22h30 I made the final trip in the car to my new home, extremely dirty, fatigued but happy. The cats complained but the dogs were calm and trusting. It made me think of my relationship with God. I’m cat-like when I resist His plans for me and think that I can do things in my own strength, forgetting that I am safe because He is always with me. Fortunately, mostly more dog-like, I hold dear the words of Corrie Ten Boom: ‘The centre of His will is my only safety’. My dogs were wonderful in the way in which they settled in the new home, as long as I was near, they were content. The dachsie just had to get used to having an upstairs and that ‘mom’ was still near even if she was upstairs, so no squeaking needed! Meister Eckhart said: ‘God is at home, it’s we who have gone out for a walk’. I therefore feel so blessed by God’s provision and tender loving care that I can joyfully corrupt Emily Dickinson’s grammar and change the ‘t’ in thou to a capital: ‘Where Thou art, that is home’. ‘Is your place a small place? Tend it with care; He set you there. Is your place a large place? Guard it with care! He set you there. Whate’er your place, it is not yours alone, but His who set you there’. (John Oxenham). - Cheryl Anderson