Summer Sheafer

“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

“Wholeness, she had learned, was not the absence of pain but the ability to hold it.”
― M.L. Wang, The Sword of Kaigen

“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

“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