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    Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home
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    Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home
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    Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home
    Ebook354 pages5 hours

    Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

    By Jen Pollock Michel and Scott Sauls

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    About this ebook

    To be human is to long for home. Home is our most fundamental human longing. And for many of us homesickness is a nagging place of grief. This book connects that desire and disappointment with the story of the Bible, helping us to see that there is a homemaking God with wide arms of welcome—and a church commissioned with this same work. "Many of us seem to be recovering the sacred, if ordinary, beauty of place," writes author Jen Pollock Michel. "Perhaps we're reading along with Wendell Berry, falling in love with Berry's small-town barber and Jayber Crow's small-town life. . . . Or maybe we're simply reading our Bibles better, discovering that while we might wish to flatten Scripture to serve our didactic purposes, it rises up in flesh and sinew, muscle and bone: God's holy story is written in the lives of people and their places." Including a five-session discussion guide and paired with a companion DVD, Keeping Place offers hope to the wanderer, help to the stranded, and a new vision of what it means to live today with our longings for eternal home.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateMay 9, 2017
    ISBN9780830892242
    Author

    Jen Pollock Michel

    Jen Pollock Michel is the author of Teach Us to Want and is a regular contributor to Christianity Today and Moody Bible Institute's Today in the Word. She earned her BA in French from Wheaton College and her MA in literature from Northwestern University, and she belongs to Redbud Writers Guild and INK. Wife and mother of five, Jen lives in Toronto, Canada, and is an enthusiastic supporter of HOPE International and Safe Families.

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    Reviews for Keeping Place

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      I didn't love this book, but it has some solid material. I appreciated that it wasn't a Wendell Berry-esque adulation of place and rootedness--it comes, rather, from an author who's mostly lacked those things in her life, which gives some weight and texture to her reflections. It *is*, as the title suggests, more of a set of meditations on home and housekeeping than an argument or sustained exploration of a concept. Michel looks at some of our contemporary ambivalences about "home," at God as "housekeeper" throughout scripture, at our "housekeeping" in this life as we wait and work toward the stable, eternal home only God can provide. She does this through personal narrative, discussion of recent research and journalistic thinkpieces, references to literature, and biblical scholarship. Her writing style isn't my favorite--a touch too clever for my taste? I'm not sure--and her use of the phrase "the housekeeping" in the second half of the book was a bit distracting. I also thought she gave short shrift to the Puritan view of Sabbath-keeping. Overall, it has that serial feel that a lot of thematic, semi-autobiographical works of this kind tend to have--as if it might have worked a bit better as a blog series than as a book. But I appreciate her constant emphasis on Christ as the answer to our longings for home, in a way that will be tangibly satisfied someday, even if we only get a taste of it in this life.

      A few quotes I liked:

      "Our inbetween places--between jobs, between cities, between houses--can easily feel like a bookmark, as if their only job was separating past from future. But these places are indeed part of the story, even when we have failed to give them a name. And most peculiarly, a generic, in-between place can even become a temple in the desert--a house of God."

      "God's work is not nearly as glamorous as our self-glorifying ambitions."

      "Home, on this earth, is no perfect place, and one of our greatest acts of faithful courage might be abiding the weariness of imperfect company, both that of ourselves and others."

      "Housekeeping is home's daily chore of faith, hope and love. It doesn't hold out for what might never be. Instead, it wrings good from what is."

      2 people found this helpful