Brown-eyed girl, make yourself a home in love.

Move on in. Set up your furniture. Decorate the place how you like. If you want to paint, paint. If you don’t like the layout, change it. Knock down some walls. Open up some windows. Whatever you feel like. 

The house of love is yours to make a home in.

Some houses on this earth are prisons, but not this one.

There’s no lock for somebody to turn, and there’s no key to throw away and lose. Come and go as you like! If you leave, goodness will trot along after you, just like her little sister, mercy, so you don’t have to be afraid, if you feel like you have to leave sometime. They’ll always keep you company. 

There’s no key to this house, because there’s no owning you and there’s no owning this house. 

Some people would have you think a home has to be earned

by a good credit score
or a certain skin color
or a certain gender
or by the sweat of your brow
or by a prayer you pray
or a creed you recite
or a water dunking 

but, no.

Everyone deserves a house. A home in a house of love. So this house of love is yours and everyone else’s. There’s just no owning a house of love.

Brown-eyed girl, come a little closer, so your wispy curls tickle my chin and your elbows land in my soft stomach. I want you to let me tell you the real secret to this house of love:

do not hide from your enemies.

You could, of course, because this home is safe. You could borrow courage from its strong beams stretching over your head and burrow away in its soft blankets and down bedding until you had what you needed to go on. 

But the truth is there’s no safety in hiding. 

They try to tell you that: to hide yourself away, make yourself smaller, fix yourself. They try to tell you you are the problem, and if you hide you, things will be Better. 

Better for whom?  

Hiding is not what the house of love gives you courage for. 

The home of love gives you courage to live! To throw open the curtains and let your bony (in your case) soft (in my case) self hang over the sash to smell the honeysuckle wafting by on a summer day, or to taste the rain on your tongue in the spring, or to smell the chill in the air in the fall. 

To be seen! And be alive! And laugh! 

In this home of love, there are no curtains to draw or security latches to slam closed or alarms to beep-beep-beep-beep on or dogs to set on intruders.

In this house of love, here is how you find protection from your enemies when they collect outside your home with their torches and pitchforks:

you fling your door wide open and you walk like a queen down your porch steps and 

you

 eat.

That’s right, you eat. There at a table, under an apple tree, you eat while your enemies look on. Jealous. 

You reach up and grab the fruit from the tree, sink your teeth in and let the juice smush all over your cheeks. There’s bread, too, on the table and you tear it with your teeth, strong and white in your brown face.

You drink the wine, squeezed from crushed grapes, and rub a little oil from the table on your face, too, so it shines. If, at this table, you sense the ghosts of a thousand ancestors before you, mija, well that’s alright. 

They’re at home, too. 

And that, my daughter, is how you live in this house of love. 

Make yourselves at home in my love.
-John 15:9-10 The Message