The one constant of Cameron’s childhood was an obscure town in the center of Alabama. His mother’s parents settled in the area in the 1970s, and the McAllister family would visit them from Austria roughly every three years. At the time it was all they could afford. If you were a kid, there wasn’t much to do there but wander and daydream, which was just fine with Cameron. He wanted as little interference with his imagination as possible in those days, and this little town was practically built for childhood reveries.
When the McAllisters moved to the United States in 1998, their lives felt chaotic. The entire country of Austria is about the population of a large American city, and coming to the States felt like entering into a kind of fantasy realm like Jonathan Swift’s Brobdingnag, where everything was bigger, louder, and stronger. All of it, that is, except for this small Alabama town, where nothing seemed to change. Sure, a neighborhood would pop up here and there and the occasional factory would close, but the overall scenery remained largely as it had always been. Old white houses with roomy porches and men with Lion’s Club hats on their hoary heads waving at passing cars. The blast of a train horn. Fields baked to a weary yellow by the fever of Alabama heat. The old cemetery with its effusion of artificial flowers.
Then there was the grandparents’ house with its profusion of sights, smells, and sounds that remained gloriously unchanged. This was Cameron’s childhood Eden.
Cameron recently had to return to this little town. Naturally, he’s no longer the young daydreamer he was then. He has two children of his own these days, one of them is so much like him it’s as terrifying as it is surreal. For Cameron, watching his son’s penetrating gaze rove over this memory-laden territory is a bit like time travel. The train horn panics him just as it used to panic Cameron, and the wealth of strange relics and antiques in the grandparents’ old home is just as enticing to his nimble hands.
But, of course, this town is not Eden. The only thing growing here these days is the cemetery. The grandparents’ house is now as dilapidated as the shuttered storefronts in the town center. Cameron’s grandfather is long gone, and his grandmother’s condition grows more precarious by the day. The place no longer feels constant to Cameron—it feels stagnant, ossified, and dying. No longer a picture of Eden, he now sees it as a vision of the transience of this world. As painful as it is, it’s a vision he desperately needs because, like most Americans, he needs to grow up. An integral part of that growing up involves the recognition that this world is not our home.
Recall Roger Lundin’s wise words, “The Bible begins in a garden and ends in a city. That’s why in human life our goal can’t be to go back to the innocence and the childhood we have lost. The way back is barred: the Christian life is about the way forward. But the way forward is the way through the cross and the empty tomb.” Lundin himself died shortly after he spoke these words. His final statement is as haunting as it is challenging: “The older I get the less nostalgic I become and the more I become oriented towards the future.”1
In Colossians 1:28, Paul gives voice to his spiritual aspiration to present “everyone mature in Christ.” Though the language of outgrowing God and faith is now a full-fledged secular trope, it’s predicated on a naive understanding of religion in general and the Christian faith in particular. If Christ is indeed the infinite Lord of all creation in whom all things hold together, it’s impossible to outgrow him. Indeed, this is simply a category mistake. Becoming like him is such a colossal undertaking that it required nothing less than Christ’s death and resurrection.
From Ralph Waldo Emerson to former First Lady Michelle Obama, Americans love the idea of becoming, of pursuing our vision of flourishing with as little interference as possible. But this restless pursuit of individual freedom and becoming puts us on a journey without a destination, one that turns us all into spiritual adolescents who can’t see beyond the horizon of this world. Christians affirm the centrality of becoming in human life, of course, but they deny the individualistic spin our culture puts on it. As Lundin makes clear, we are indeed moving forward, but Christ is our destination, our goal, our home. Christians are daily becoming more like their Savior because they know that one day they will see him face-to-face.
The strategies outlined in this book will be largely futile if the homes in which they’re practiced already belong to a culture at odds with Christ and his church. It remains incumbent on Christian homemakers to build a culture in their homes that reflects the church rather than the surrounding world with its competing myths, stories, and salvation narratives. Step one in this process is the recognition that a culture of the home is inevitable and that it therefore requires a high degree of intentionality. A home that exhibits the culture of the church will be a home shaped by Christ, his Word and the sacraments, and the praise that is due to him. Such a home will always be in tension with the surrounding culture. This healthy tension is conducive to a proper understanding of the temporal nature of the earthly city. It is part of the basic essence of being in and not of the world.
Such a home will also recognize the impermanence of this world. All of the misconceptions we’ve outlined are predicated on a secular, this-worldly stance. Information saves takes for granted that salvation lies in human thought and ingenuity. With its narrow focus on daily circumstances, fear protects elevates self-preservation above love and self-sacrifice. Closely aligned with information saves, spiritual education belongs to experts outsources Christ’s authority to various human professionals.
As Christians we must meet each of these challenges with love and compassion. To those enslaved by fear and uncertainty, our homes must demonstrate that “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). To those who believe that information saves, we proclaim Christ “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). We must seek to know “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19). And to those wavering in their confidence and tempted to outsource Christ’s spiritual authority, we boldly profess in his own words, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:18-19).
In the end the only places abounding in lasting faith are those that belong to Christ. It’s our prayer that your home will be such a place and that all those who dwell with you will come to recognize the hallmarks of his ownership, rather than yours.
In our lives, in our homes, in our parenting, we are never alone. We leave you with the words of the apostle Paul to the Thessalonians: “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it” (1 Thessalonians 5:23-24).