Still Measuring Every Kitchen Against Mama’s: Philippians 3 and Settling Into a New Home

She has lived in the new place for three years, and she still calls it “the flat”. Home is somewhere else: the house on the hill in Clarendon where she grew up, with the big mango tree and the kitchen that always smelled of thyme and escallion. Every time she stands at her small electric cooker in Leeds, she compares it to that kitchen, and every time it loses.

Or perhaps it is a man who has moved his family from a rented house they loved into a home of their own that feels colder and less friendly. Or a widow who has downsized from the family house into a small apartment. Or a couple who lost a house through hard times and now rent, and cannot stop replaying what went wrong. The details differ, but the habit is the same. The past keeps getting a vote on whether the present can be home.

What Paul chose to leave behind

In Philippians 3, Paul talks about his past, and what is surprising is that most of what he lists are achievements. He had the right family background, the right religious training, a reputation for zeal and blamelessness. These were his old victories, the things he used to be proud of. And he says he now counts them as loss compared with knowing Christ.

Then comes the verse many people remember:

“No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not achieved it, but I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead.” (Philippians 3:13, NLT)

Paul has not lost his memory. He tells the Philippians exactly what his past was. “Forgetting” here means something more like refusing to be governed by it. Neither his failures, such as persecuting the church, nor his old successes are allowed to set the direction of his life. He is straining forward, like a runner who does not look over his shoulder.

The good old days can hold us back too

We usually think of the past as something painful to get over. But for many households, the harder thing to release is a past that was good. The childhood home. The street where everybody knew your name. The years when the business did well and money was not a worry. Those memories are gifts, and there is nothing wrong with treasuring them.

The trouble starts when they become the measure of everything else. A house can never become home if it is only ever compared to another house. A new church community cannot become family if we keep telling them how we did things back home. Children growing up in a new country can feel, without anyone saying it, that the place they live is second best.

The Israelites had a version of this. Not long after leaving Egypt, they started remembering the fish, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions and the garlic they had eaten there (Numbers 11:5). They had been slaves. But memory had quietly edited out the whips and kept the food. Nostalgia can do that. It makes it hard to receive the manna in front of us.

Pressing forward, one room at a time

How does a household actually move on without erasing its history? A few practical thoughts:

• Bring one treasure, not the whole museum. A grandmother’s Dutch pot on the stove, a photograph of the old house in the hallway. Honour the past with a few chosen things rather than trying to recreate it.
• Make one new tradition. A Friday dinner, a garden patch, a Christmas open house for the neighbours. Give the new home memories of its own.
• Stop the running comparison out loud. Notice how often you say “back home” or “at the old house” in a disappointed tone, and try to catch it, especially in front of the children.
• Grieve what needs grieving. If you lost a house through debt, divorce or disaster, it is right to mourn. Pressing forward is not pretending it did not hurt. It may help to talk it through with a pastor or counsellor.
• Thank God for this address. Pray in each room, however small, and ask God to make it a place of his presence now.

Citizens of somewhere else

A few verses later, Paul says that our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20). That can sound like a reason not to care about earthly homes at all. In fact, it frees us to hold every earthly home a little more lightly, the one we left and the one we are in. None of them is our final home. Each of them can be a place of faithfulness for the season we are given.

The house in Clarendon was a gift. So is the flat in Leeds. The God who met a family in one kitchen is quite able to meet them in another.

For reflection

• Is there a past home, good or painful, that still gets a vote on whether your present one feels like home?
• What is one thing you could do this month to give your current home a memory of its own?

A prayer: Lord, thank you for every house that has sheltered us, and for the people who made them home. Help us to treasure the past without being ruled by it. Heal what still hurts. Open our eyes to the blessings of the place where we live now, and make it a home where you are welcome. Amen.

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