Inviting Grace Home

Home is a place where life happens, and life is messy. Fights ensue. Messes splatter across fresh cleaned floors. Laundry piles behind closed doors. And meals are consumed as quickly as possible before the next thing needs to be done. In the disillusioning reality of it all, it’s easy to become discontent and look for solutions in the wrong places: if the house were bigger, if the kitchen were newer, if the furniture weren’t so old, if the kids had less junk. In the midst of doing and living, sometimes it’s even easy to forget what our homes are, what life is, what grace really means. 

I’ll tell you what my home is NOT. It’s not a House Beautiful or Better Homes and Gardens magazine home, where the decor is perfect, the toys have all been contained in cute little hampers, and the children are cleaned up and happy—at least for however long the photo shoot lasts. It’s not a sitcom home where the problems and solutions all wrap up neatly within a half hour drama. It’s not even the picture-perfect blog home, with peaceful smiles and sunlight streaming in. And if any of these were my vision for my home, I’m afraid I would live in utter defeat and hopelessness because these images are not reality. Pretending perfection leaves no room for grace. And what my home needs, what I need, more than a new cleaning routine or organization tool—I need to invite grace home.

My home is a place of messy mistakes, sinful people, and dusty furniture. But I do have a vision for my home that embraces all of its imperfection. My vision for my home is a place that welcomes life’s mess and receives grace daily.

Inviting Grace Home

• I want my home to be a place of grace—where we sin and learn forgiveness, where we spill and learn responsibility, where we succeed and learn humility, where we live and learn the purpose of life, where we discover what we cannot do and learn of the One who can.
• I want my home to be a place for life, a greenhouse of living—a place of nurturing and encouragement, a place of redemption and creating, a place of equipping.
• I want my home to be a place of sustaining—where we learn to give when we are all spent, where we learn to love when there is nothing left, where we learn we have needs and Who can meet those needs.

So if the choice comes down to new decor, a cleaning frenzy, or some quiet time alone with God, it’s going to be my vision for what my home is that determines the choices I make. And those choices will define me as much as the home I live in. But here’s the key: it will not be accomplished by what I do as much as by who I am.

My home will not be a place of grace, if I’m not living in the grace I’ve been given. My home will not bring life if my heart and words are not reflecting the Life. My home will not sustain anyone if I am serving out of the limitations of myself instead of out of the abundance of the I Am.

Inviting grace home involves first receiving it into my life—not “giving myself grace,” because truly I’m incapable of giving myself what I’m desperately in need of. Someone perfect, someone infinite, someone full of grace must give grace. Inviting grace home means accepting God’s grace in my life and realizing my need for it. Inviting grace home is extending God’s grace to others instead of requiring perfection. Inviting grace home is embracing the messiness of life as the perfect canvas for God’s redeeming masterpiece.

My home may not be magazine-cover-worthy, but that’s not really my goal. My goal is to be a canvas for God’s grace. So welcome to our home, where messiness and imperfection have a seat at the table, and where grace has an open-invitation.