Allow Your Heart to Be a Home for Those You Love

“If my heart was a house, you’d be home.”
Adam Young

Adam Young is the person behind pop music’s Owl City. As Owl City, Young has written a song entitled “If My Heart Was a House.” I heard this beautiful song for the first time one Saturday morning last year. The chorus of the song is a simple sentence: “If my heart was a house, you’d be home.”

What a beautiful sentiment, I thought. The human heart is like a house that welcomes in those we love and invites them to be at home within us. We are able to do this because the human heart is patterned on God’s heart, which is a home to us all. God’s heart is our sacred refuge—a house, a home where love is plentiful, comfort is endless and peace is enduring.

In the Gospel of John, Chapter 14, Jesus tells his disciples that there are many rooms in his Father’s house and that he is going to prepare a place for them. I had never thought of that “house” as being God’s heart before I heard Young’s song. But it’s true that we have all emanated from God’s heart to our respective places in this world, and one day, we will each return to that very room in God’s heart that has been prepared for us.

Through great love, God thought us into existence. We are created by Love to be love, to live love and to share love between ourselves. The heart is a foremost symbol of love and so it makes sense to equate the heart with being a home of sacred warmth and serenity.

The Spirit of God is the guest master within each of our heart-homes. Let’s hope that we, ourselves, are the first guest we invite in. It’s essential that our very hearts be a treasured place for our self-nourishment. Once we are able to cherish ourselves within our own hearts, we will be well prepared to invite others into our heart-home—the one we have prepared for them—the home that allows our souls to shine.

Comments

  1. E.S. KraayDecember 28, 2010 at 3:44 AM

    As Thomas Merton wrote, "We are what we love. If we love God, in whose image we were created, we discover ourselves in him and we cannot help being happy: we have already achieved something of the fullness of being for which we were destined in our creation."

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