MADELEINE L’ENGLE (1918-2007) | We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.
MARJORIE PAY HINCKLEY (1911-2004) | Home is where you are loved the most and act the worst.
Imagine the kind of house a child remembers forever—not because it was grand, but because it felt true and safe. A place where someone healed their small hurts with steady hands. Where ordinary evenings taught them how to belong. That kind of home only happens on purpose, day by day. And it matters more than we realize.
For better or worse, children carry “home” into the rest of their lives. The way they trust, forgive, lead, and grieve all begin there. When a child learns that love is unconditionally present and honest—they grow into adults who can give and receive the same. When a child learns that they won’t be exiled for their mistakes, they risk greatness. When a child sees tenderness modeled even in the small things (a shared coffee, a gracious interruption of watching the game to listen, an apology that’s actually given), they learn how to be human.
As parents, we aren’t expected to build museums of perfect behavior. We’re called to build sanctuaries of belonging. In practical terms, this means choosing presence over perfection, family traditions over distraction, and loyalty over convenience. It means making thousands of small deposits of kindness, correction, humility, and celebration so that when life’s challenges arise, the child’s inner bank of belonging can cover the cost. The result is not just happier kids — it’s resilient adults, secure marriages, and a lineage of trust that outlives us.
If you want your children to know who they are…show them where they belong. If you want them to bravely face the world and still be kind…live this in front of them at home. This is not sentimental advice. It’s an investment. And the returns are courage, empathy, resilience, and the confidence to be known and to know others.
Let’s make home the most prized inheritance of our children.
RANSOM RIGGS | I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was. Likewise, I never imagined that home might be something I would miss.
The name home reaches places in us other words can’t touch. It opens the rooms of our heart where we keep sacred things: first wishes, first hurts, first loyalties. Home collects our memories like a familiar light collecting dust. Nothing else—neither fame nor fortune—quite holds us like that.
Home is more than just a physical house. It’s more than just walls, furniture, and a place where we played during childhood. What transforms a house into a home is the living that happens inside: the small, simple acts that bind people together. Home is a first church, a micro-community, a place where we learn how to be human together. It is where our characters are shaped by daily loyalty.
This is not idealism. It’s not a fairy tale we tell ourselves to feel better. Home is rooted in the real…care that wakes at midnight, hands that mend, a voice that calms. It’s as much moral as physical…where the shelter and the soul are joined together.
Love is the engine that drives the home. Without love you may have the form (e.g., the rooms, the routine) but not the force that activates everything else. Love is instinctive and stubborn as it pulls us back through storms, through wrong turns, through grief. You can lose money, status, comfort—but the security of home often outlasts them all.
Ties matter. Threads of care, of duty, of memory, hold the family together. Cut those threads and you don’t just break a foundational rule—you break a life. Death can separate people…but it does not always break the ties. They live on in habit, in story, in the way a child suddenly remembers their mother’s laugh and is moved to tears.
The mother is the heart’s axis in most homes. Her small mercies and continuous love give life to the house. She watches, she worries, she rejoices. Even after she’s gone, she lingers in the ways we think, act, and remember. Her absence becomes a presence of a different kind.
We are built for home. Our entire social world is built from it: how we learn trust, how we learn to care for others, how we eventually become citizens of a wider family of people. When life strips away other joys, we still look to home for safety. It’s the place of refuge where we can be honest and be forgiven…where we can take our failures and let them be held.
And so we pine for it…not the polished picture, but that imperfect, human center that says: you belong here. That belonging far outweighs awards, money, and public applause. Even traveling to distant places seeking novelty…we still hunger for the familiar dining room table that knows your name.
Home is where we learn to belong before we learn to belong to anything else. It is where the heart first learns how to give and how to be held.
So be grateful for home because someone there has already given a little piece of themselves to you. Home remembers your name before you say it, forgives you before you ask, and keeps place at the table for you even when you’ve been late or lost or stubborn. Protect that small, (extra)ordinary kingdom. Keep tending to those daily, “boring” acts of love.
Let your heart learn to return the favor. Show up. Speak the truth with love. Listen (and mean it). Build slowly and faithfully: one good habit, one honest apology, one shared laugh at a time.
If you leave…return. If you stay…be present. Either way, make home not only where you sleep, but where your children draw strength from its memory.
