Our Holy Hum of a Household

Our house doesn’t run on a schedule as much as it runs on relational chaos. If our house were a play list, it would be everything from 60s country to some really obscure metal core band (whom if you don’t know their first album, you’re not really a fan) and everything in between.

There are rhythms, sure; school stuff in the morning, bedtime prayers, dinner around the table (hopefully). Mostly there is a living, breathing ecosystem of personalities learning how to share space and merge stories.

Five people, three kiddos, and a husband and wife. What I often miss, admittedly, is a God who delights in doing His most mysterious work in ordinary rooms. Even when it’s wild and weird.

If you stand in our kitchen long enough, you’ll hear it. I have to remind myself it’s not just noise, but theology. If I’m attentive enough, I can hear creation unfolding. I’ll little hear little image-bearers discovering who they are. Hopefully my wife and I can hear a small domestic church being built in real time. Instead of what my mind fogs me with as chaos and endless noise.

Because that’s what a Christian home is: we don’t retreat from the world, but hopefully facilitate a training ground for love in the middle of the chaotic, the humorous, and the exhaustion.

Holly and I didn’t just “get” married. We stepped into a vocation and calling. We now had new jobs with no experience. What was once individual is now communal and shared.

Marriage is not the merging of two lives into one indistinguishable blur. It is the covenantal weaving of two distinct stories into a single narrative of grace. Figuring this out and working on it is a lifetime in the making. She is steady where I am contemplative. She is practical where I am poetic. She brings order where I bring imagination. She builds the trellis that lets the vine grow. She is home. And I hope I’m those things for her.

And together, we are learning that love is less about chemistry and more about craftsmanship. We are artisans (tektōns) of our marriage, these kids, and this household. Sometimes, the work is sloppy. But we still work.

Scripture calls marriage a “great mystery” (Ephesians 5:32), and it is. Not because it’s complicated (which is true) but because it is sacramental. It makes visible something invisible. It hopefully reveals the way Christ loves His Church. Marriage isn’t a contractual obligation, but a covenant. There’s no policy here or operations manual. Just the scars we each bear merging together, hopefully joining stories to tell a more beautiful one.

Marriage forms the climate of the home. It is the atmosphere our children breathe. Long before they understand theology, they understand tone. They know whether love is safe and if grace is real.

Our marriage is the first sermon they hear. And I know some days, it’s an awful one on my part.

Our three children are not extensions of us. Little autonomous appendages roaming the country side. No. They are revelations and the essence of Holly and I. Each one arrives bearing a different facet of God’s creativity, like light refracting through stained glass. (Same sun different colors, if you remember.)

One asks questions that bend my theology.

One feels the world in waves and wonders.

One watches quietly and then says something that stops the room. They all butt shuffle and giggle. They each feel things deeply. And they want their way, all the time…but are learning to ebb and flow.

They are living parables.

Jesus didn’t explain the kingdom. He pointed to children and said, “There. That’s it.”

In our home, discipleship doesn’t start with curriculum. It starts with presence and the selfless act of listening. It starts with learning who God is revealing through these three souls entrusted to us. Again, somedays we get it right, other days we miss it completely.

We are not raising them to be impressive.

We are raising them to be faithful, kind, and the kind of courageous that doesn’t bow to conformity. We want them to know they are loved before they ever try to earn it. Our desire is for them to be wonderfully weird and vibrant.

I wish I could tell you that every night we gather around the table. We don’t. We try, but life is life and schedules are schedules. But when we do…

It’s not elegant. It’s loud. Someone always needs a fork. Someone always tells a story halfway through chewing. Someone always spills something. No one is sitting and eating. You know, all the stuff we romanticize about the dinner table is pretty much a lie.

And yet, in some odd way, it feels like church.

We break bread, we give thanks, we ask about each other’s days, we carry one another’s joys and burden, we laugh and get frustrated with one another, and (most importantly) we hug it out.

The Eucharist is not confined to sanctuaries. It was born in a home and every Christian table is an echo of that first upper room.

In a world that is increasingly isolated, distracted, and fragmented; the family table becomes an act of quiet rebellion. It says: “We will be present. We will be together. We will belong. Even if this is absolute chaos and more rice is on the floor than in bellies. Daggum it!”

Living with five personalities means constant sanctification. Making spaces and things holy.

It means learning that love speaks in many dialects. It means discovering that what feels obvious to me feels overwhelming to someone else. It means slowing down long enough to really see one another. Again, we miss it sometimes. But we try and try again. Because attention is the purest form of love.

Simone Weil said that attention is prayer and I think she’s right. To attend to another person, to truly see them, is to stand on holy ground. Ground that we are making and cultivating together.

Jesus never rushed people. He never reduced them to categories. He asked questions. He listened. He entered their stories. We are trying to do the same. Even if our faces are in our hands and I’m picking food out of Holly’s hair at bed time. (We have a monkey-esque grooming ritual.)

But the goal of parenting is not control.

The goal of marriage is not convenience.

But the goal of family is communion. Togetherness in messiness.

Scripture says we are “living stones” being built into a dwelling place for God (1 Peter 2:5). That includes our home, all the rooms and spaces.

Our walls have heard prayers. Our floors have caught tears. Our hallways echo with laughter. Our bedrooms hold whispered hopes. It’s a holy place. Filled with hot wheels on the floor and Barbie’s in the bathtub. You see, God is not absent from our ordinary. He is hiding in it. We just have to seek Him is all.

And somehow, through school work and tantrums, through scraped knees and slammed doors, through late night talks and early morning coffee; He is building something eternal inside something temporary.

It’s really quite special.

We are not a solo act. We are a harmony. We each hum a different note. But the symphony of our togetherness is unique to us.

Each voice carries its own tone. Each story brings its own weight. And when we listen to one another, legit listen, we begin to hear it.

A song of grace. A melody of mercy. A hymn of hope. A rock ballad of excitement. A head banger of joy. Maybe a little rap song of resistance.

We are definitely not perfect. I assure you we are not polished. But by the grace of God, we are what we are. And that’s a holy thing. Each family is.