Recently, my home back in Louisiana was destroyed by fire. It was no accident.

I had leased it in the past while I set about doing other things in my life. I intended to move back there when I got too old to run the roads anymore. It belonged to me; a place to be King of my own Castle and it was payed for.

The love, the care and work, crawling around on hands and knees to scrub hard wood floors with fine steel wool, restoring every corner, the frustrations and joys that go with it all. Katrina almost knocked it down, but the old girl survived and beamed once again.

It wasn’t a mansion. But it was a nice place on a large piece of property and somewhere to have my own tepee and a place to run when things got too hard, a safety net.

I was blessed and grateful to have it even though it often also brought tears and headaches. Always something to repair, update, taxes, insurance and paying someone to take care of it in my absence.

Postscript: Don’t rent your home. Everything you ever heard about renters is true. It does not belong to them, so they do not share your love and care for the place, no tender loving care needed if it’s not yours.

A divorced lady with three children lived there. It seems she allowed her ex to come for a visit and because she would not take him back, he evidently became very angry. He decided that if he didn’t have a happy home with her that she should not have it either.

After she went to work and the kids went to school, he went back to the house, doused the entire upper floor with charcoal lighter fluid and set it on fire. He told the fire chief that he wanted to burn up everything she had, including everything the children had too.

He succeeded in doing that, she lost all. It seems that it didn’t occur to him that he would destroy my place along with it.

She first told me that defective wiring in my house had caused the fire and she had lost all the things she had worked so hard for. Thus began a nightmare I had never dreamed of. It flipped this country boy’s brain. I started grieving.

I felt ashamed after watching videos of what happened in Japan in the last earthquake. Homes, cities and lives swept away in graphic detail. Yet I grieved.

Again, the latest swath of tornadoes in Alabama and another total loss of people’s homes blown completely away, lives lost and people missing.

Once again my plight paled compared to such devastation and loss. The scenes from New Orleans are forever etched in my mind. I can so relate to people losing their home.

The job crisis, the crash of the housing market and too many irons in the fire has caused so many people to be without a home, to lose everything they’ve invested.

I have encountered people with homes “under water” who say they wish theirs would burn down. T hey think I’m lucky and maybe I am.

I always wanted a home, a place where there was love and trust and peace, oh God, especially peace. Poppa was a rolling stone as the song says, but anywhere I hung my hat was not home to me.

Home is where the heart is. Maybe. I understand homelessness. I’ve been there too. Living in shelters and in your car is not home. Whether you rent, own or pay a mortgage doesn’t matter.

It’s about coming home, shutting the door behind you and saying, “this is me!” It doesn’t matter if it is an old rusted house trailer or a one room cabin like some of us remember or an apartment where we’ve decorated and arranged our things.

Home is home, where your roots are, that’s why eventually many of us go back to retire there some day.

The idea of living in the same house all your life with love and peace and passing the home on to other family members and generations intrigues me.

I see the conditions so many live in around the world and the closest to me is Haiti, those with barely a thin tent or cardboard to cover them, no place to safely and comfortably lay the children to sleep, nothing and little hope.

We have been so blessed in this country. Most of us have no idea or concept what others have experienced . Even our poorest here have it better than so many others.

But for me, it takes time for my heart to catch up with my head. I know I’m blessed, I am alive and thank God no one was injured in the fire on my little green acre.

I find it calloused to hear, “Oh it’s only a material thing.” That’s true though, and it is now even more apparent to me. Just where are my treasures today?

If ever I was reminded it is now of that old song we once sung often. “This World is not my Home.” I’m just a passing through. I’ll get another place, the insurance will likely take care of most of it.

Many people cannot even afford house insurance today. And the old song describes me, “And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore….”

To know there is a home in another place, one more grander and safer than my little cement blocks is the greatest hope today.

My Christ had no home, no place to lay His head and again I feel ashamed but there is no doubt that He grew up in a home where He was loved and specially cared for.

He once knew what home was. But one thing is clear to me. All of these possessions are small compared to what He has prepared for those who love Him and if God has spared our lives and that of our children, we are blessed beyond measure.

If you live together in love and harmony, you have the greatest home there is on this old planet.

Home: A place that I’ve been longing for so long.

Didn’t you always love gold and silver. To live in that Holy City in a mansion, wow! Putting my treasures in the right place where fire, rust, worms or any corruption can taint it or destroy it.

“Laying up my treasures in that Home above, trusting fully trusting in my Savior’s love…………..”

 

First published: May 1, 2011.

~ Robert Blackburn

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Robert Blackburn

 

 

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