If I were to ask you to take a few moments and describe your Household, what descriptors would you select? Would you describe the physical aspects of your home? The people who live inside? The U.S. Census Bureau’s definition is this: “A household includes the related family members and all the unrelated people, if any, such as lodgers, foster children, wards, or employees who share the housing unit.” Merriam-Webster chooses “those who dwell under the same roof or compose a family.” My preference for explaining a Household comes from Andy Crouch in The Life We’re Looking For, “A household is both place and people—or maybe better, it is a particular people with a particular place. A
household is a community of persons who may well take shelter under one roof but also and more fundamentally take shelter under one another’s care and concern. They provide for one another, and they depend on one another.”

If I embrace “[taking] shelter under one another’s care and concern…[providing] for one another,” then Building a Household becomes something greater than the number of residents in the French country-style home in Jackson, Tennessee. Although the IRS may offer me the title of head of Household, even when there are no other heads to be counted under my roof, I take the responsibility of Building a Household to mean more than counting bodies, for it extends to the hospitality offered, not only to those who walk through the door of my home, but those who walk through the doors of my life. Building a Household, at least for me, extends to my office, the classroom, my vehicle, wherever COM is working, and sometimes even a random ballpark or tennis court. With Crouch’s definition, households “extend beyond family, built on bonds of love, are more possible and more common than we often realize.” I would even define some sports teams from my past as a type of household.

Crouch shares, “we need a place where we can exercise our fundamental capacities—a place where we can channel our emotions and longings, be known in our unique
depth of self, contribute to understanding and interpreting the world…we need a place where we can invest ourselves deeply in others, come to care about their flourishing, and give ourselves away in mutual service and sacrifice in ways that secure our own identities instead of erasing them.” Building a Household utilizing this framework is one of the ways to combat the relational bankruptcy that is resulting from lives taken over by our digital devices. Devices that remove our personhood and deny the fact that God created us to be relational beings. We are persons made for love, and this ability to love can become difficult in our technological, impersonal world.

Crouch is offering us a lifeline to avoid the default settings that a device-driven impersonal world creates—by Building a Household where “every person can find a home.” Households are where we are recognized for who we are as a person, where we make eye contact and engage in all sorts of conversations, and where we find connection with other real human beings. “You are part of a household if there is someone who knows where you are today…You are part of a household if there is someone who moves more quietly when they know you are asleep…if someone would check on you if you did not awaken…if people know things about you that you do not know about yourself, including things that if you did know you would seek to hide…if others are close enough to see you and know you as well as, or better than, you know yourself…if you experience the conflict that is the inevitable companion of closeness—if someone else makes such demands on you that you sometimes fantasize about driving them out of your life.”

So much of what it means to cultivate the Habits of a Flourishing Life arises out of Building a Household where we seek help to navigate the harsh realities of life, where we develop a Digital Philosophy together, so we don’t lose the ability to value others as real persons. “This is the one thing we need more than any other: a community of recognition. While we must always insist that every human being is a person whether or not they are seen or treated as one by others, we also know that no human being can flourish as a person unless they are seen and treated as one. And for that, the household is the first and best place…So much of the tragedy of the modern world comes down to this: Most of us do not have such a place.”

I’m being challenged to consider the ways that I choose to Build a Household—with my students, my neighbors, my friends, my family. How can I intentionally set aside the digital world and engage with real human beings—people who need to be seen, heard, and recognized? What about you? How might God be challenging you to consider the ways you might be unintentionally failing to recognize the people around us who are desperate for connection in a very lonely world? Please consider sharing your thoughts in the comments below.

References:

Crouch, A. (2022). The life we’re looking for: Reclaiming relationship in a technological world. [Kindle version]. Convergent Books.

Household. (2021, October 8). Subject definitions. United States Census Bureau. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/technical-documentation/subject-definitions.html#household

Household. (2022). Definition. Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/household?utm_campaign=sd&utm_medium=serp&utm_source=jsonld