It was a joke

You’ve probably heard it:

“Home is the place where family members go when they’re tired of being nice to other people.”

Because, really, how long can you keep it up, that being nice thing? If 'nice’ is an external thing you carry, it gets heavy and at some point you have to set it down. You set it down at home.

Here, I’ve thought of another one:

“Home is the place where family members go when they need appreciation, love, acceptance and encouragement.”

Should be, anyway. The appreciation and love and acceptance is never enough, though, is it.

Seems like there’s two main ways the family thing goes: family members somehow gain security and get filled-up and then from that deep well foster acceptance and love with each other and then from that ‘nice’ place the family goes out and is nice.

Or, empty people go out and act nice but it’s all external, you get tired, and you go back with your family and act like how you really feel.  Empty.  And get mad because they don’t fill your cup.  But they can’t.  And you can’t theirs.

Because, “There’s a break in the cup that holds love inside us all.”

"My people have committed two sins: 
  They have forsaken me, 
    the spring of living water, 
and have dug their own cisterns, 
  broken cisterns that cannot hold water. – Jeremiah 2.13