You probably know the one. It hangs above the doorway or beside the cabinet with the good glasses, gold letters on a dark wooden board: “Christ is the Head of this house, the unseen Guest at every meal, the silent Listener to every conversation.” In other homes it is “As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD,” stitched in cross-stitch by a grandmother, or Psalm 23 in a frame gone slightly yellow, or “God Bless Our Home” on a plate beside the calendar from the hardware store.
These things are part of the furniture of Caribbean Christian life, at home and in the diaspora. Walk into a flat in Birmingham or a townhouse in Fort Lauderdale and you will often find the same plaques, carried across the ocean in a barrel or bought again on the first trip back. They say something about who we are and where we came from. They are also worth thinking about a little more carefully than we usually do.
Writing it on the doorposts
The habit has deep roots. When Moses urged Israel to love God and keep His words close, he told them to talk about them at home and on the road, at bedtime and in the morning, and added, “You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deuteronomy 6:9, NKJV). A house marked with Scripture is an old and good idea. Words on the wall shape the air a family breathes. Children who grow up passing Psalm 121 every morning on the way to school often find, decades later, that they can still recite it in a hospital corridor.
So this is not an argument for taking the plaques down. It is a reminder of what they are for.
Searching the Scriptures, missing the Person
In John 5, Jesus heals a man who had been ill for thirty-eight years. It happens on the Sabbath, and instead of rejoicing, the religious leaders object. In the argument that follows, Jesus says something that must have stung men who knew their Scriptures thoroughly: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me” (John 5:39, ESV).
They had the words. They studied them, copied them, argued over them. What they missed was the One the words were about, standing in front of them, and the healed man walking home with his mat.
It is possible for a home to do the same. The plaque says Christ is the unseen Guest at every meal, while the meal itself is eaten in silence, each person on a phone, one chair empty because of a quarrel nobody has resolved. The frame says “as for me and my house,” while the house is where the worst words of the week are spoken. The words are true. They are simply not being lived beneath.
When the wall text becomes wallpaper
Anything we see every day eventually disappears. Designers know this; it is why a room can feel stale even when nothing is wrong with it. The same thing happens to Scripture on the wall. After a few years, nobody reads it. It becomes part of the paint.
Some families find small ways to keep the words alive:
- moving a framed verse to a new spot once in a while, so it is noticed again;
- asking a child to read the plaque aloud at dinner and say what they think it means;
- adding a small board by the kitchen where the household writes a verse for the week in chalk;
- telling the story behind an old piece: who stitched it, what she prayed while she did, what the family was going through;
- choosing, when building or renovating, one place in the house where a verse is deliberately part of the design, carved over a doorway or painted on the verandah wall, rather than an afterthought.
A house that bears witness
Jesus said the Scriptures bear witness to Him. The best Christian homes do the same, not mainly through what hangs on the walls, but through how people are treated inside them. The helper is paid on time and spoken to with respect. The teenager’s doubts are heard rather than shouted down. The spouse who has failed is forgiven. The neighbour whose child is sick gets a knock on the door.
Picture a visitor who notices the plaque by the door and then, over the course of an afternoon, notices other things too: the way the grandfather thanks God for the food and means it, the way an argument about the gate is settled without anyone slamming a door, the way the family sets a plate for the cousin who has fallen on hard times. By the time she leaves, the words on the wall have become believable. They point somewhere, and she has glimpsed where.
Keep the plaque, but look past it
The next time you pass the verse by your door, try reading it as if for the first time. Ask whether it describes your house or only decorates it. And remember that the words, however precious, were never the destination. They were always meant to point to a Person: the One who heals men who have waited thirty-eight years, who sits, unseen but not absent, at every table where He is welcome.
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