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What do we do when we want God in our lives?

We must invite Him in.

Our relationship with God must be a constant invitation. In everything we do – “when you sit in your house, and when you walk on the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up” (Deuteronomy 6:7) – we must invite Him into our lives.

According to Chassidus, God’s desire, taavah, is to dwell in the lower realms, to make a home, bayit, with us; the two words have the same gematria, which teaches us that He wishes to have an abode in our world, the lowest world on the totem pole.

Our objective is to invite Him in to every facet of our lives. Our goal is to clean the house, prepare for His company, and graciously host Him, not merely as a guest, but as a permanent member of the household.

Why else would He have instructed us to build the Temple? His shechinah, His spirit, desires a dwelling place among us, and the culmination of our constant invitations to Him is the end of the end, when He truly dwells among us.

On this earth, we are pilgrims passing through, memories of home woven into our existence. The soul longs to return to an as yet unknowable home, its eternal source. We are wanderers, seekers of home, the place to which we dream of returning. Our eternal symbol of warmth and familiarity, the reminder of our origins, our resting place.

Despite the wear and tear the years might inflict upon us, an inadvertent seeking continues. The ache for home is a hunt for meaning and for truth, the pursuit of an esoteric truth which can only resonate with us at the very depths of our souls.

Home, the indefinable place that rests somewhere on the border between reality and fantasy, where peace reigns eternal. Home, the word that means so much more than wood and plaster; a word that brings with it warmth and comfort, like the tender hands of a mother, the pleased smile of a father. Home, the place for which we fight, the people for whom we lay down our lives.

Home, the place where we know we are loved.

Having been created in God’s image, it follows that we are merely reflecting God’s infinitely deeper desire for home. We are sojourners whose time here is finite, but who long for the infinite. Though we may not know the day or the hour, we know that our redemption is at hand, closer now than it ever was before. Our task is a twofold one: to create a home for our fellow man, and to create a home for our God, and through this we will invite salvation into this world.

Salvation is our ultimate home. And it is there that we will live forever.

I shall dwell in Your tent to eternity; I will take shelter in the cover of Your wings forever.

Psalm 61:5

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