Shelter, Home, and Community
By Michael Shiaw Liaw

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Seven years is the longest I’ve lived in any one address. This finally happened when I was 37 years old, decades after Taipei, Fukuoka, Pennsylvania, Hong Kong, California. As a family, we globetrotted with our father, a graduate student in meat science and then a quality control manager for a McDonald’s meat supplier. In my twenties, on my own in Southern California, I moved fifteen times-- because I had to justify myself to immigration regularly, I knew my addresses and dates of residence by heart. I remember, too, the first furniture I didn’t dumpster dive for, a loveseat and a coffee table for half off at Salvation Army. I remember when I folded the cardboard moving boxes and, instead of storing them in the closet for the next inevitable move, recycled them. Even in my late 30’s, I had traveled with all my life’s belongings packed in two suitcases, a backpack, and a violin case. All this served to complicate my relationship to the concepts of shelter and home, and my answer to questions about where I was from. 

When I think of shelter, I think of danger and survival. Whether shelter takes the form of a 36 square foot steel-reinformed concrete tornado shed, or an underground nuclear bunker with water and air filtration systems, or, for the wealthy, a corporate tax-free Cayman Islands bank account, shelters serve to preserve life and our possessions. My father moved us from Taiwan to Japan for educational opportunities unavailable in Taiwan. Then to Pennsylvania when companies around the world, in response to the Sino-British Joint Declaration signed in 1987 to return Hong Kong to China, began training Chinese speaking employees to enter the Chinese market through Hong Kong. If there was hope or excitement in our moves, I recall little of it, and I recall instead my father’s long absences, which I knew had to do with our welfare. The world was a place that my father’s absence protected us from.

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Just as we wish of the circumstances that make temporary shelters necessary, they are meant to be temporary stopovers-- the unhoused become housed permanently, the abandoned kittens are adopted by loving homes as indoor cats, “even the sparrow has found a home.” Home, then, on the other hand, suggests safety and permanence, in hope if not also in reality. “Make yourself at home” we say to our guests. “Home away from home,” describes a place of happiness or comfort. It is “close to home” where our deepest feelings and affections reside. Jesus considered it a comfort to promise, “In my Father’s house are many rooms.” Is my home here, in Whittier, CA, everywhere, anywhere, or nowhere? My answers vary.

What happens, however, when a home becomes a shelter? As in what happened in 2020, when the whole world was instructed to “shelter in place,” making a shelter of our homes against the dangers of covid? Homes turned from residences into pods, shaped by an alertness to dangers, the severity and quantity of them as high as they were unknown. As the original instruction to shelter in place for 3 weeks stretched into three years--as was the case in Los Angeles County--our homes, which were now shelters, became the new normal. Shelters had turned into homes. 

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Globally and locally, we see what happens when a shelter becomes a home. Refugee camps turn into settlements or permanent shelters. The unhoused on Skid Row of Los Angeles is now called a stable homeless population. An example closer to home and far less consequential, my Zanzibar plant has spent three years in the same pot; its pot-molded roots are suffocating themselves trying to outgrow the pot, and it’s dying because it can’t. During the pandemic, the waiting was made additionally difficult by lack of resource or vision for how to wait or how long to wait, turning stress (which isn’t inherently harmful) into toxic stress. What was supposed to be temporary was slowly becoming, it appeared, permanent. Hope without end can turn to despair.

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The Hebrew and Christian Bible is at home with these tensions. God has placed eternity in human hearts, but God also says, “return to dust, you mortals.” The apostle Paul says that our perishable bodies will be clothed with the imperishable, mortal bodies with the immortal. Jesus leaves his followers in the world even as Paul looks to his citizenship in heaven. The Christian witness is that truly reliable shelter is in God’s hands even as the longed-for, permanent home is in the new heavens and the new earth to come. All the giants of faith listed in the Hebrew epistle lived in this tension, being sure of what was hoped for and certain of what was not seen.

Currently, I live these tensions at Orchard Community, a community I founded in 2019 that empowers housing-insecure young adult men to acquire lasting life skills toward successful adulthood. I could say that God planted the seed when I served in youth ministry at a local church and witnessed the youth growing up in unstable homes with insufficient parental support. I could also say, considering the arc of my story, that Orchard was God’s stay, a gift, to my itinerant, nomadic life. 

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For many of our residents, their homes had become shelters: family becoming foster family, living out of a car, moving frequently and unpredictably due to circumstances or some guardian’s whims or mental health struggles (what happens when we aren’t at home in our own bodies? When we aren’t at home in our own minds?). At Orchard, we value that each resident be relationally rooted. Through safe, long-term housing for each resident in his own fully furnished room and through group dinners with other residents and with community members, we seek to restore a measure of home and stability, without which lasting change can be difficult. 

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But Orchard isn’t meant to be forever. Orchard, though home, is temporary, is a shelter. The gift of time and safety is meant as relief to attend to one’s life, not as emergency, but gift. The household rules and programs are meant to teach skills and wisdom, portable and made one’s own. At Orchard, we seek, by uniquely tending to each resident’s strengths and struggles, needs, and goals, to empower each resident with lasting life skills. With a residency time limit and individualized program requirements, we hope to promote each resident’s growth and ownership to better prepare them for adulthood. 

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In these ways, Orchard Community is both home and shelter, a tension which, as a Jesus-centered community, Orchard is at home in. While our residents need not be followers of Jesus, our desire is that each one tastes the assurance and hope that we have. 

How do you experience the tension of shelter and home in your life? How do you keep from the despair that the unpredictability of shelters can engender? How do you keep from the complacency that the comforts of homes can settle us into? How do you joyfully and hopefully engage your earthly life, which is both home and shelter, reliable and temporary, good and groaning? As I continue to make sense of my own transitory life, may God ever be my fortress, the only certain shelter, even as I follow the Son of Man who, unlike the birds and foxes, had no place to lay his head; even as I am led by the Holy Spirit who, like the wind, goes wherever he pleases and assures me of my heavenly citizenship.