Heaven Is A Homeplace

On the morning of Friday, September 27, I sent a frantic text message to my cousin Paul:

“Been thinking of Granny’s house and hoping it survives this storm! Let us know!”

It wasn’t long after I sent the text that the lights went out, along with the internet. And cell signal, already spotty in the mountains, seemed to drop altogether. There we were: me and my husband and our two small children, alone with the wind, the rain, and our worry.

I live in the mountains of Western North Carolina in a little community called Meat Camp just north of Boone. My husband and I are grateful to be raising our girls here, in a region where my roots grow deep. My six-times great-grandfather came to this area around the time of the American Revolution and set up a homestead on the banks of Little Rock Creek in Bakersville, an hour or two south of where I live now.

A farmhouse dating back to the mid-1800s still sits along that creek, inherited and recently renovated by my cousin Paul. “Granny’s House,” as we’ve always called it, is home to so many memories for me: Christmas mornings, summers splashing in the creek, bountiful tables of fried trout, biscuits and gravy, soup beans, and fresh tomatoes. Just across the road is a small graveyard where Granny (my great-grandmother) along with countless other relatives (great-great grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins) are buried.

That house and that land are the center of kinship and ancestry for me, a physical space reminding me of who I am and whom I came from. Appalachians call this a “homeplace.”

Though I spent my growing-up years in Alabama and East Tennessee, I think I was always meant to come back to Western North Carolina. We’ve now lived here for 13 years, longer than I’ve lived anywhere in my life. It was here where I discovered the meaning of the word home, where my husband and I created our own “homeplace” of sorts.

People say that home is where the heart is. But I like to think that home is where the body is. What I mean is that to “be home” is to know a place, a people, and a personal shelter in an embodied way. Home is something you feel in the ground beneath your feet, the roof over your head, and the other human bodies encircling you with unconditional love. It is both concept and substance, an incarnation of belonging.

For Appalachians especially, home is more than a house. Home is the land that sustains you. It is the rich soil of the bottomland where you plant your garden and grow your apple trees. It is the fields and forests where your ancestors grazed cattle, hunted game, and foraged for food.

Home is a terrain veined by countless rivers and creeks, the lifeblood of our population. Our waterways carve out the hollers we call communities, churn the wheels that traditionally grind our grains, give us water to drink and fish to eat, and offer our children endless hours of play along the banks and mossy creek rocks. We navigate our lives by these waterways. They create the undulating grids of our townships, chart the course for our roads and infrastructure. They name our communities: Little Rock Creek, Laurel Fork, the New River, Cane Creek, Pine Run, Boone Fork, the Toe River, Meat Camp Creek.

Home is a culture, the generational practices born of hardscrabble living and ingenuity. It is the art, the music, the foodways, and the storied mythologies that are imparted to you by grandparents and great-grandparents. Home is an economy of creativity and provisions: familiar coffee shops, favorite eateries, concert venues, farmers’ markets, and theaters.

Home is the vast network of kinship that supports you. It is the friends who show up with food when you are sick, the neighbors who mow your grass when you are out of town, the family who comes around you to mourn when you mourn and celebrate when you celebrate. Home is the church that communally practices the habits of a holy life: worshiping, praying, learning from Scripture, and serving those in need.

And yes, home is a house—a literal “homeplace” that holds in its holy walls all those instances of safety and rest. It is the floorboards your children learn to walk on, the walls and roofs that keep the rain and cold out, the tables on which you break bread with family and neighbors, the kitchens and laundry rooms in which you conduct life’s labors in all their mundanity and joy. Ordinary havens, extraordinary vessels of love. Home is a sacred space.

Home is sight, smell, sound, and taste: the vista from a hilltop, the wet earth of a creek bank, the plucked string of a mandolin, the sweetness of fresh-baked apple pie. Home is the topography you are always eager to return to. Home is the place where the road rises up to meet you.

But sometimes the road falls out from under you.

When Hurricane Helene tore through Southern Appalachia, every stream, every tributary, and every underground spring in the mountains became a raging torrent. Our beloved waters that made this place home suddenly took so many homes away.

The waters engulfed roads, pulling pavement into the water and washing out bridges. It poured into our downtown businesses, scattering merchandise and spoiling food. Our hillsides rushed down upon houses in waves of mud. Trees smashed into roofs and cars.

Suddenly, everything that makes a home a home was interrupted. Power was lost, well pumps could no longer draw water into houses, and all communication was down. Restaurants, stores, and schools across the region shut down indefinitely. The winding roads that used to take us to town, to church, and to our friends were suddenly inaccessible, washed away and making many neighborhoods and communities devastated islands, cut off from the rest of the world.

There is a feeling of betrayal when a land you love so much seems to turn on you. I felt this acutely even though my own house remained undamaged by wind or water. We had no power and no water, and we quickly ran through our shelf-stable food. Limited cell coverage meant painfully scarce communication with friends and family. When we saw that the only two bridges leading in and out of our neighborhood were dangerously close to collapsing, we made the hard decision to relocate to my parents’ house.

Our house was standing, but we’d lost our home.

Now we are left wondering: When can we “go home”? What we are really wondering is—when will our friends be safe, when can we hike again, when can we rebuild our gardens, when can we have coffee together, when can we break bread at our table, and when can we worship in our sacred sanctuaries?

When home is disrupted by a broken creation, when we suffer as inhabitants of a world that has been groaning since the Fall, we are wont to think of our heavenly home. Popular belief among many evangelicals is that when we die, we go to heaven and leave this physical earth and these corporeal bodies behind forever. We picture heaven as a disembodied, ethereal place, no longer spoiled by the hardships of materiality.

But Romans 8:21 tells us that God’s plan is for a new heaven and a new earth. Revelation 21 and 22 speak of an embodied experience of God’s perfect presence, where a crystal-clear river flows from the throne of God and there is a tree of life bearing fruit every month (22:1–2). The Holy City where we will reside rests on a mountain, and its walls and gates are beautiful (21:10–19). Isaiah speaks of feasting and drinking an abundance of food and wine in this new heaven and earth (25:6), a place where all people will be safe and secure.

And just as Jesus’s body was resurrected, so too our bodies will be resurrected, free from the pain of hunger, thirst, and loneliness. Our heavenly home is resurrected life with Christ. It will be a physical, material reality, just as our own homes are now. Finally enfolded in the communion of all the saints, we will know no wants and experience the joy of true, deep rest. It will be the ultimate “homeplace.”

This feeling of the absence of home in the wake of a disaster is perhaps a gift, a way of knowing that deep in our hearts we long for sacred belonging, and what we long for will be given to us someday. What’s ours to do now is to endure—to celebrate the comforts of home (when we have them) as a foretaste of what’s to come, to rebuild when homes are broken, and to pray for the eventual restoration of all things.

Late Saturday night, I received a text from my cousin. He’d heard from a neighbor that the storm was indeed bad at Little Rock Creek, that the waters had risen, and that the trees had come down. But Granny’s house was undamaged, standing strong as it had for 150 years: a homeplace just waiting to shelter someone.

A picture of our future home and shelter from all harm.

Amanda Held Opelt is an author, speaker, and songwriter. She has published two books.

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