Home is the Heart of a Woman

I wish to speak into the themes the Lord has been revealing in my heart. The long-lasting undercurrent, running through everything I have done in the past four months - from uproting my life in Lisle Illinois, to wandering nomadically across the southeast US, to settling in the Blue Ridge Mountains of South Carolina - has been the theme of ‘home.’

Home, I have come to understand, is not a place in the outside world, so much as it is a space in our hearts. My name ‘Elizabeth’ literally translates to mean ‘Dwelling Place of God,’ and I have felt a calling from the Lord to fashion a Dwelling Place of God in my heart.

In this article, I will speak of home specifically as it relates to the Woman’s heart. I will speak of men later.

In our lonely world today, we see words thrown around like ‘tribe,’ ‘community,’ ‘new family,’ etc.. In an attempt to find their place, and as they reject the standard structure of the family, men and women are seeking to construct a brand-new system, a tower of babel, if you will, that will assert itself above God’s design, and declare, “See how we have fashioned ourselves into a noble structure: we are now above the natural order.”

They do this in steps that I think you will find familiar - steps I thought were the normal way to pursue the idea of home, but which I now realize are twisted, perverted… in fact, the exact opposite of our call from the Lord.

Before I could meet the man who would become my husband, I believed I needed to extend myself into the working world, alone and with my feminine genius, to make my mark, change lives, and earn an income. Then, once I had made those external victories, I would be formed enough in my personhood and femininity to meet the man of my dreams, leave the public sphere for awhile, and have children. Once I had children, and my husband was consistently making a stable income, once we owned a house and land of our own, then we could relax, take a deep breathe, and declare, “At last, we are home.”

But, much to my amazement, home is not a place in the outside world. It is not a house, or children, or stable income. I realized I had been doing damage to my own heart by pursuing these beliefs, and seeking to extend myself to ‘make my mark.’ I had been looking outward, when the fulfillment of all my desires lay within. Home, in the truest sense of the word, is a ‘Dwelling Place of God.’

When the Lord tapped on my heart with this idea, I was stunned. I immediately sat down and wrote, but it wasn’t very legible, since it actually took many weeks for me to fully understand this interior gift into which my Beloved Lord was inviting me.

“Stop trying to impress others, and prove your worth,” He told me. “Stop trying to live according to the rules of the world.”

As this theme unfolded in my heart, I realized it was acceptable, even enviable, to live a hidden life, and when the Lord introduced me to my temporary home at Heart Ridge, and the opportunity to take life at a slower pace, I was in an internal place to embrace it with my whole heart.

The world wants women to think that they were oppressed when they were in the confines of the home. They want us to think it is natural, even fulfilling, for us to work eight hours a day in a high-pressure job to earn enough to barely support ourselves. They want us to extend ourselves even further than that, to fight toward the proverbial glass ceiling, and with feminine brute force, crash through it. They want us to exert so much energy in the outer world that we have none to extend at home. ‘Home is not where woman finds her fulfillment,’ they claim, and when we live as they want us to, they’re right. Home becomes a transfer station on our many roads to changing the world. We sacrifice our own hearts for the right to work.

But what about women who work? Aren’t there Godly women in the working world? Do you really think all women should stay at home?

This is the natural question I’ve been getting lately. But I think we’re asking the wrong question. We’re making out ‘home’ to be a place, but remember that it’s not a place. Home is a space in the heart. It’s a space of the female heart, in particular, and this space is a Dwelling Place of God. It is a place within which a woman ponders all the things of life, wherein her husband finds rest, and her children nourishment. It is an oasis in the desert of the world.

So the answer is no: I don’t think all women are called to stay at home, but I do believe all women are called to reside in the home of their heart. And our working world does not allow for such a disposition. It is so loud and high-pressured that we collapse at the end of the day. We develop auto-immune diseases and chronic low energy as a result of constant stress. We are so drained we cannot find rest, let alone offer it to others around us.

This is not the Lord’s design. The Lord desires to draw the woman’s heart into His. Making of our hearts a Dwelling Place for Him is far more fulfilling, relaxing, and joyous than any external successes we might enjoy as a liberated woman in the working world.

There is so much more to say on the theme of home, but I will leave you with this thought for now:

Have you made of your heart a dwelling place for the Lord? And if not, what is keeping you from being able to develop this yearning of your feminine heart?