Paper Houses

What kind of houses are we building for our faith, for our lives?

Einat Kessler

July 2023

I thumb a vague message into my phone and send it over social media to a woman I have never met.

Something like, Hi.

Something like, I hope this isn’t too weird. Ha. Ha-ha.

Something like, Nobody in my real life is talking about the things I need to talk about, but I get the sense that you are. Can we meet?

When she walks into the coffee shop a few weeks later, she is wearing a brightly colored sun dress and the confidence of someone who will not be moved by anyone’s uncertainties, least of all her own.

We talk for hours—about faith, doubt, certainty. Belonging, courage, change.

Before she leaves, she takes a selfie of us, our arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders, and I have a vague premonition that I will look back at this photo of us in several years and remember this day as the day I started to be brave.

Even still, when I walk to my car and click my seatbelt into place, a fresh wave of fear washes over me.

Oh God, I think to myself, pressing my forehead to the steering wheel.

Oh God, I’m going to lose everything.

Fall, 2004

Fourth grade. Our class builds a miniature town in one corner of the classroom.

Each student receives an empty milk carton—one of those standard, school-cafeteria-sized milk cartons that tastes like cold paper.

Our homework is to take this milk carton home and make it into a miniature house to be placed in the miniature town. Over the next few weeks, we will learn about important life skills—writing checks, going to work, paying taxes, purchasing home insurance, salting the sidewalks when the snow comes.

That night, I lean over the kitchen table and cut out tiny blue construction paper panels of siding with painstaking precision. My brother helps me build a garage door out of card stock that can be rolled up and down with a toothpick. I draw a white front door with a sidelight, a color crayon chimney, and white shutters to frame the front windows.

At the end of the week, I nestle my milk carton house carefully next to my classmates’ and take a step back.

It’s perfect.

I am so proud of my little paper house.

May, 2025

On the television, a TV show about couple’s therapy. A husband and wife sitting far apart on a sofa.

The husband’s name is Boris, and Boris is not happy.

He is going on and on about home—how they have moved a dozen times, how he cannot find a place where he feels settled, how he wishes his wife would do more to understand, why can’t she understand, why won’t she try harder to understand?

What strikes me about Boris, sitting on the couch, crossing and uncrossing his legs, is that he is asking for something nobody can give him.

It’s a tired, old story—one that all of us believe at one point or another.

Once upon a time, I, too, believed home was something I could build outside of myself.

So I did. I built and I built and I built.

I made an entire house out of paper.

I believed that it would hold.

Winter, 2019

After my oldest daughter’s first birthday, I pick up a book from the local library detailing the Circle of Security framework.

This book explains how, from a young age, children form their sense of home based on their own felt sense of worthiness, love, delight, and safety from their caregivers.

The author says that, from a young age, if children return to their caregivers and feel nurtured, safe, and enjoyed, they will build an inner sense of stability that allows them to go back out into the world and broaden their circle over time.

In other words, these children will carry with them, in their bodies, the deeply held belief that they will be ok.

Most of the time, they grow into the kinds of adults who do not need, as often, to cling to external structures or people for a sense of stability and home.

Their sense of home starts from the inside and pours out.

Their circles grow big and wide and expansive—a pebble dropped into a pond, the ripples moving out and out and out.

Fall, 2004

A few weeks after building my milk carton house, I walk into the classroom to find my classmates crowded around the miniature town in the corner, hushed and murmuring.

I stand on my tiptoes and peer over their shoulders. The entire town is in disarray—trees scattered, hail littering the roads, roofs torn off, stray shingles everywhere.

When I pick up my own house, I find that most of the siding has disintegrated. The wet paper shreds between my fingers.

I will not think about this shredded paper house for twenty years, until a friend from grade school mentions it in passing.

I will not remember what the lesson was supposed to be, exactly—only that I am re-learning some version of the same thing, now:

Paper houses do not keep.

May, 2025

What I want to ask the man from the couples therapy TV show:

Boris, what if home is less of a place and more of something you carry with you?

What if you could build a well of safety on the inside?

What if you could tear down the tiny paper houses you thought would sustain you?

What if you built something no-one could take away?

What I mean, Boris, is what if you believed you would be okay?

July, 2024

One year after meeting with the woman at the coffee shop, I am washing dishes at the sink while my children make pies out of Play-Doh.

I cannot for the life of me shake the feeling that I have completely lost the thread of my faith.

I don’t know how to explain to people that I have lost Christ, completely. Certainly, I know the idea of him. Certainly, He is the central character in the gospel story I am told week after week after week.

And still, this Jesus has nothing to do with me in my actual, embodied life, nor does He require anything from me other than mental assent to a set of theological certainties.

As I rinse the last dish, a song comes on over the dining room speaker—a woman’s lilting voice, singing about the imminence of Christ. Line after line of Him inhabiting our bodies in mysterious, tangible ways.

Christ, closer than our blood.

Christ, in the lines on our hands.

Christ—His heart—beating in our chests.

Now I am staring out the window, letting the dirty dishwater drain, and my daughter wants to know if Jesus is really closer than our blood.

We take turns examining the blue-green veins on our wrists in the sunlight.

And because theology has not been nearly enough to sustain my faith, because I want to teach my daughter how to build a house on something stronger than paper, because I want to give her the person of Christ and not just the idea of Him, I tell her the truth.

Yes.

Yes, He really is.

July, 2024

Later that week, when the kids go to sleep, I inexplicably find myself looking up images of Christ.

Image after image of artists’ renditions of a white, blue-eyed Jesus being sold on Etsy for $1.99.

A 2002 edition of Popular Mechanics, featuring an image of Jesus, wide-eyed and earnest, on the front cover.

A Dutch photographer’s photorealistic image of what Jesus may have looked like, according to artificial intelligence.

I can feel my soul fumbling, clumsy, reaching towards some tangible encounter with the Divine, reaching for some version of faith I do not yet know exists.

One year from now, I will remember this moment when I see icons of Christ hanging in a friend’s home. I will understand more of what I was seeking—some tangible window into the mysteries of the Christian faith.

A vague understanding that we participate, even now, in spiritual realities.

The Divine, taking up residence in my own body, soul, imagination.

Christ, working in every sphere of my sense of self instead of estranging me from it.

A deep sense of belovedness that allows me to draw my circles wider.

A pebble dropped into a pond, the ripples moving out and out and out.

June, 2025

I had forgotten all about the photo from the coffee shop until recently, and one day, I text my internet-turned-real-life friend to ask if she still has it.

When she sends it to me, I look at it for a long time.

I remember that feeling—of teetering on the edge of losing everything.

I want to reach out to the person I was in the picture, the one with the tentative bravery, the one with her forehead pressed against the steering wheel.

I want to hold her hand, to tell her—Yes. Yes, it’s true.

You may lose everything. The paper may shred. The house may crumple.

Still, what if you’re still okay?

What if you discover a kind of faith that can withstand the worst the world has to offer?

What if it’s built on something no-one can take away from you?

What if it feels like coming home?