Ask people why they want to own a home and the word “secure” comes up almost every time. Not “rich”, not “comfortable”, not even “proud”. Secure. Nobody can tell me to leave. Nobody can raise the rent in January. The children will always have somewhere to come back to. When I am old, I will not be at anyone’s mercy.
Those are good reasons, and for many families across the Caribbean and the diaspora they are hard-won. A grandmother who spent thirty years moving from one rented room to another knows exactly what a title in her own name means. So does the son in Brooklyn who finally sees his parents’ house paid off. Security of tenure, the plain right to stay, is one of the quiet foundations of a stable family life.
But it is worth asking, especially at the turn of a year when we tend to make plans, what kind of security a house can actually give, and what kind it cannot.
What a house really protects
Some of the protection is very concrete. A well-built house with a sound roof keeps out rain and, if it is properly tied down, a good deal of wind. A title that is clean and registered protects you from someone claiming your land. Once the mortgage is paid, your housing costs usually drop to maintenance, insurance and taxes, which can make a pension stretch further. Owning also gives you control: you can plant the breadfruit tree, add the second bathroom, paint the front door whatever colour you like.
These are not small things. Scripture is full of the hope of a settled home. The prophets pictured a time when “everyone shall sit under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid” (Micah 4:4). That is a picture of security that includes land, food and freedom from fear. It is not wrong to want it.
What it cannot do
Yet anyone who has owned a house for more than a few years has learned its limits. A title does not stop a hurricane. A paid-off mortgage does not stop a diagnosis. Walls and grilles can keep out a thief but not grief, not a son’s addiction, not the loneliness of a widow in a four-bedroom house with nobody to cook for.
Consider a couple who spend twenty years building, block by block, a house big enough for grandchildren. They finish it. The grandchildren live in Atlanta and visit every other summer. The house is secure. The couple are not, not in the way they hoped. What they wanted, underneath the concrete, was closeness, and concrete could not deliver that.
Or think of the man who works two jobs to clear the mortgage early because he is afraid of losing everything. He clears it. The fear does not leave. It simply finds a new address: the roof, the car, the pension, the price of cooking gas. When security is really a way of managing anxiety, no amount of property is ever quite enough.
Hoping forward without fooling ourselves
A new year invites optimism, and it should. It is a good time to review the household budget, check the insurance, make the will, fix the gutter before rainy season. Those are ways of loving your family sensibly. But January also carries a quieter temptation: to believe that if we just get this next thing done, we will finally feel safe.
The writer of Psalm 25, a man who knew enemies and uncertainty, put his hope somewhere else: “No one who hopes in you will ever be put to shame” (Psalm 25:3, NIV). He is not saying that nothing will go wrong. He is saying that the one thing that finally holds is not a thing at all. It is a relationship with God, who does not change when the currency does.
The book of Revelation opens with a picture of the risen Christ in a long robe (Revelation 1:13). In the ancient world, a long robe was not what you wore to run or to work in the fields. It suggested dignity and a task completed. There is an image there for anxious householders. The most important work has already been done, and done by someone else. We can take our part in the ordinary work of keeping a home without believing that everything depends on us getting it perfect.
Holding the house the right way
So what does it look like to value a home properly, neither despising it nor leaning our whole weight on it?
- Protect it wisely. Keep the title documents safe and up to date, maintain the roof, carry insurance you understand. These are acts of stewardship, not lack of faith.
- Share it freely. A secure home is a gift you can extend: a spare room for a student relative, a Sunday table for someone who has no family nearby.
- Say out loud what it is for. Families who talk about why they own a home, and what should happen to it later, argue less about it when the time comes.
- Notice when fear is driving. If each goal you reach only produces a new worry, the problem may not be the house.
There is nothing wrong with the grandmother’s joy at her own front door key. It is a good gift, and gratitude is the right response to it. But the deepest security she has is not in the lock. It is in knowing who she belongs to, which was true in every rented room she ever lived in, and will be true long after the house has passed to someone else.
As the year turns, by all means make the plans. Fix what needs fixing. Save what can be saved. And then hold the whole thing, walls and title and hopes, with an open hand.
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