The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming QUOTES

1 " Home is to be a safe place, a refuge for all who enter, a protection from the harm and storms of the world. Yet often or even daily we open our doors -- usually via television or the internet -- to ideas and images that can damage our faith, abuse our hearts and minds, sear our psyches, and tear apart our peace. Home should be a place where, behind its doors, one should expect to find protection and safety from all the harms of life, including voices that do not speak truth or wisdom. Only the foolish would invite just anyone to enter the door of their home. "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

2 " Every day in each inch of space, each rhythm of time, each practice of love, we have the chance to join God in coming home, in living so that we make a home of this broken and beautiful world all over again. Love is enfleshed in the meals we make, the rooms we fill, the spaces in which we live and breathe and have our being. "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

3 " All people need a place where their roots can grow deep and they always feel like they belong and have a loving refuge. And all people need a place that gives wings to their dreams, nurturing possibilities of who they might become. "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

4 " If the precious, limited hours of my day are used bit by bit in scanning information, I will have less and less time for the attentive, slow, good work of creativity, conversation, and connection that real people and real homes require. "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

5 " But my parents understood that the world that they made within the walls of our house was what constituted home. So I grew up in spaces framed by art and color, filled with candlelight, marked by beauty. I grew up within a rhythm of time made sacred by family devotions in the morning and long conversations in the evening. I grew up with the sense of our daily life as a feast and delight; a soup-and-bread dinner by the fire, Celtic music lilting in the shadows, and the laughter of my siblings gave me a sense of the blessedness of love, of God's life made tangible in the food and touch and air of our home.
It was a fight for my parents, I know. Every day was a battle to bring order to mess, peace to stressful situations, beauty to the chaos wrought by four young children. But that's the reality of incarnation as it invades a fallen world....What my parents-bless them-knew...is that to make a home right in the midst of the fallen world is to craft out a space of human flesh and existence in which eternity rises up in time, in which the kingdom comes, in which we may taste and see the goodness of God. "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

6 " When someone once asked me just what it was that my parents did that made me believe in God, without even thinking I said, “I think it was French toast on Saturday mornings and coffee and Celtic music and discussions and candlelight in the evenings . . .” Because in those moments I tasted and saw the goodness of God in a way I couldn’t ignore. "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

7 " How we need more “homemakers” so that all who live in this transient, contemporary world might have a place to belong, to feel loved and valued, to serve and be served, to give and receive and celebrate all that is good. So "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

8 " how to create a home that nourishes, nurtures, and sustains life and beauty. It is all about how to order your living space and what happens there to embody the joy and beauty of God’s own Spirit. "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

9 " Keeping house—picking up those messes one more time—is a service of worship to God as we craft a place of beauty and comfort for all who enter our sanctuary of His very presence. "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

10 " As I reflect back on all of the years of our family’s life together, what I remember best is not the mountains of dirty dishes and pots and pans and socks left on the floor and piles of laundry. I reflect instead on precious times shared with Clay, the kids, and those we welcomed into our home—snuggling on the couch together, nursing babies and rocking them to sleep, sharing movies and huge bowls of popcorn, comforting children after a nightmare, and all those heartfelt kisses and cards that said “I love you! "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

11 " Home is the place in which we picture, day after ordinary day, the fact that love will endure, that grief will be healed, that joy, one day, will last forever and the celebration will never end. "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

12 " Beauty is about picturing God’s unchanging goodness and daring to bring it into my own small, dusty days. "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

13 " Gratitude isn’t a gutting out of thanks, nor is generosity a painful sacrifice. Rather, both come from an overflow of joy. And neither is formed in a vacuum; both must come from recognizing that God’s goodness to us is so extravagant that it must be passed on. "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

14 " In a culture that often views a child in terms of the expense in time and money he will cost in his lifetime, how important it is to intentionally recognize the infinite value of a tiny human being, created with the very imprint and image of God on his life, and to understand that this little one’s life will have consequences for eternity. "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

15 " Influenced by the thought patterns of machines, my own mind cranks along, unable to rest, habituated to the disembodied, unresting online atmosphere. But the constant stream of information isn’t helping me to think more deeply, to contemplate, to have the long-considered knowledge that becomes wisdom. Rather, it is conditioning me simply to glean information and then move on. As author Nicholas Carr wrote, “The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it.”[3] "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

16 " took time to really ponder "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

17 " Words make worlds "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

18 " we want our home to be a strong shelter in the midst of the storms of life. "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

19 " Home is your garden of life, so to speak, and you are free to order it and plant it as you will. But all great works of life must be planned in order to make them productive, useful, and flourishing. "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming

20 " I began to picture my children’s hearts as treasure chests of a different sort, and I vowed to fill them with intrinsic treasures: the best stories, memorized Scripture, priceless images of classical art, excellent books, memories from great feasts enjoyed together and special days celebrated, great Bible stories and wisdom passages, plus heart photographs of love given, holidays cherished, lessons learned. "

― Sally Clarkson , The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming