Back Story 4
Custom Designed Homes
After all these years and all the figurative baskets, bags, and boxes I’ve filled with home thoughts, I’m still an apprentice to the Builder.
After seeing hundreds, maybe thousands, of families clearly care for their families at least as much as I care for mine, I know biblical home building is not developing a tract home subdivision. Biblical homes are not built from pre-fabricated materials. When everyone does exactly the same activities, in exactly the same way, the result is a peer pressure factory, a cult center, or an agenda apartment, rather than the ideal community of single-family, custom homes.
Principle Homes
Biblical homes are built from pre-designed principles. When everyone uses the same principles in their home building, the structures are all solid and unique, the floor plans all distinct, but equally effective, the designs all different, yet coordinating with the community.
Not that there aren’t problems building a principle home. Sometimes an apprentice gets enamored with one part of the structure, and neglects other parts. Or a whole group of apprentices decide they want someone else’s design. Or one apprentice thinks other apprentices would do better to follow the plan for their house, rather than follow the plans they were given for their own houses. Or another apprentice expects lots of help with their project, keeping others overtime for the benefit of their house, and to the detriment of the other houses.
The apprentice-builders are to work together. The plan does not call for individual, insular, walled fortresses dotting the countryside, but a delightfully designed community with abundant green space, fresh running water, a vibrant corporate worship center, prime empty lots for someone new to begin construction, and every door, an open door.
In my dream house, there is always a fire to sit beside to talk. Come, sit by the fire. Let’s talk about time and biblical house building.
Priority Stewardship 
I like that you pointed out that all Biblical homes are not all identical. Too often, I think, we tend to get caught up in how everyone else does things, forgetting that our homes are unique, are family demands are different, our schedules and interests are not the same as everyone else’s. I think that we would all be better off learning this sooner, rather than later – that we can hold to Biblical principles in our homes but we don’t have to all do things the same ways. And we should not look back and “regret” that we didn’t do things according to someone else’s “system.”
The key seems to be the security that each of our families is doing as the Lord would have us do. We can learn so much from others, but all we learn still needs God’s special application to our own family. Sometimes we go along out of insecurity that we can know God’s direction for ourselves, and sometimes because we are too lazy to work through what we’ve learned for ourselves.