If I walk into my living room, I can thank God for the food stains on my rug. They remind me of infants and toddlers sitting there with soggy crackers in their chubby, grubby fingers. I can look at my living room ceiling, and the cracked tile reminds me of a son who cracked it when he tried to see how high he could leap when he was a teenager.
I can look at my lamp tables and remember when my New England table lamps had different glass globes because pre-teens decided to play catch and kept hitting a lamp. Careless children - but they love each other today because of all that togetherness time when they were young. Our living room furniture is old, beaten, and sagging - but I thank God for all the energetic, happy bodies that have curled up on it, lounged on it, cuddled with a spouse or child on it, slept peacefully on it.
My ancient stove's front burners seldom light unless I light the back burners first, and the oven is a blackened mess. But I thank God for all the cookies, pies, cakes, meatloaves, lasagnas, and crustless quiches I've baked and cooked with it, and the wonderful aromas that have filled the house with the best perfume. Countless children, teens, and adults have congregated around that stove to visit while waiting for their favorite food to issue from it like miraculous manna from Heaven.
Every wall in every room is covered with calendars, paintings, and photos, and behind them are the holes from the nails they hang on. Sometimes, if I want to hang a different photo, the hole has to be filled up and a new hole made. The holes mar the walls, but the photos that cover them are worth the holes because they show me the beautiful faces that have lived between these walls, touched them with their hands, painted them, and made them holy. I would never prefer perfect walls to lived-in walls. I thank God that I need the holes.
My dining room table usually has a vinyl, flannel-backed seasonal tablecloth on it so I can keep it clean at seasonal family meals. After a meal, I have to wash down the tablecloth's sides to remove dried gravy, or the stringy cheese from pizza, or spaghetti sauce, or clumps of chocolate from brownie pudding, and sweep the floor to catch runaway peas that have gotten squished. If I miss a pea, well, it'll wait for me till I or someone else's unwary foot finds it. No longer do I think of visitors' finding loose peas underfoot as a catastrophe. I'm now certain that they have loose peas or their equivalents under their dining room tables too. How liberating it was for me to figure that out! I thank God for the lesson of runaway peas.
If I peek into the basement, I find the graffiti of names and hearts on the staircase wall, drawn by a teenage daughter as she sat on the stairs and talked to her friends on the phone. I thank God for her spontaneous artwork that makes me smile and think of her whenever I see it. Why should we paint over such a dear memory?
We, our children, and grand-children have played musical beds over the years, moving from room to room as the children aged and one or the other moved out. The bedding has changed as well, and extra pillows and blankets are stored underneath ready for an extra visitor who wants to sleep on a couch. Different beds could use updated mattresses, but these old ones cling to your body when you lie down on them, and they whisper in your dreams of all the people they have cradled to sleep, all the silent tears shed in these rooms, all the muffled giggles, all the caresses of love. I thank God for the beds which have silently, gently borne all of us through the years.
I have a friend who shoves her clutter under her bed whenever she has company. How I wish I had a small enough pile of clutter that it would FIT under my bed! But clutter tells its own story of family life. The committee meeting notes waiting to be placed in the right folder. The entertainment book bought from a grand-child. The latest artwork drawn by my sister. Charge slips and change from trips to the store and meals at a restaurant. Library books, and books and DVDs loaned to us. I thank God that I have such a rich and fulfilling life that generates so much clutter that I have to think about where to store it.
For years, I put off inviting people to my home because it wasn't "perfect." Over the years, I've learned that no one has a perfect house any more than any one of us has a perfect life. The most important thing is to have not a house, but a home, a lived-in, well-worn home, inhabited by the most important people in our lives, and wearing well over the years because it contains real, bubbling-over joy. Such a home elicits deep gratitude to God in our hearts, gratitude for all the joys and sorrows that are part of real, intimate, caring family life. Walking into such a home, looking around, any visitor can tell that the people who live in such a place are more important than the possessions that decorate it.
"You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them," said Nobel Peace Prize awardee Archbishop Desmond Tutu. When we accept our family as a God-given gift, we recognize that every face enriches us far more than a new lamp could, or a replaced tile ceiling, or a new stove with burners that light perfectly. And our hearts, alight with lasting love, rest there, and find peace.