Stuff

The house was filled with family, as it often is on Sunday afternoons. But seven year old Stephen was all alone in the den, stretched out in a wing backed recliner, set almost to a horizontal position, watching the hockey game on the big screen TV. He looked like the king of the castle. He could not have looked more satisfied if he were stretched out on a beach in Hawaii.

When Paul came in, Stephen looked around the room and said, "Grandad, how did you get all of this stuff?"

Paul said, "It took a very long time. And remember Stephen, it is just stuff."

His brother and sisters were playing in the next room with their cousins, but Stephen was pondering life and the aquisition of material goods.

When Paul told me this story, we laughed at Stephen's curiosity. God has blessed us with a beautiful home; in trust. It is really his.

We try to make it a place of welcome and it is a well used house where no one worries too much if things get scratched or broken. Nothing matches too perfectly, but everything is well loved; the air is filled frequently with the aroma of large dinners cooking; and its walls hold the echoes of laughter, voices raised in prayer and of many friendly conversations.

And that is the "stuff "after all, that really matters.

1 Corinthians 2:9-10 (New International Version)
9However, as it is written:
"No eye has seen,
no ear has heard,
no mind has conceived
what God has prepared for those who love him"
— 10but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.

Comments

Anonymous said…
THANKS, Belinda, for helping me appreciate anew my house where nothing matches too perfectly and the air is more often filled with the smell of something cooking rather than one of the exquisite candles I bought on impulse with visions of the atmosphere I could create.

Thanks for painting a picture of HOME, a concept that is so quickly disappearing from people's lives, it seems. Oh, I'm beginning to sound like an old woman fretting about the directions things are heading! But I do suspect 'lack of home' is a deep wound affecting so many these days. May God show each of us the role He'd have us play in creating 'home' for others.

Okay...off my soapbox and back to work. :-)
8:07 AM
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