restoration

Sunday afternoon, and the house smells like cinnamon rolls and there is sunlight pouring in our front picture window and a basketball bouncing outside on the concrete driveway we poured last summer. A little aqua blue hood with blond hair peeking out bobs across the bottom frame of the window and a hymn book is sprawled open at the piano. The blue head comes inside bearing a package almost as big as herself, "Mommy, there was a package at the front door." It's all a good reminder to me that home is what you make it -- and I mean that as a good thing. I've been despairing recently about all of the constraints on our time as thirty-something adults now, and all of the things that are always laying around the house and always needing to be picked up, and the felt lack of forward movement on our farmhouse renovation project. It's always this thing of we can never quite catch up and as you may have sensed thematically in my recent posts, it's been hard for me to sort through how much to keep hoping that we could at some point catch up and make progress and how much to just let my expectations float down the river and succumb to the clutter and chaos.

So I needed this re-read of Ann Voskamp's blog post from a few years back on restoration.

Specifically these points:

Abram didn’t know where he was going, but he knew Who he was going with.

You don’t always have to know where you’re going — when you know you’re going with God.

When you just want more clarity — God just wants you closer.

Restoration is one step at a time, trusting the Restorer. That's the spiritual side of things.

And then there's the everyday, physical side of things, so eloquently described by Courtney Reissig in Glory in the Ordinary:

"So in light of God being part of the work that we do, being hidden in the work that we do, how do we as image bearers image him in such ordinary tasks as housework? How does working out the grass stain in your son's baseball pants or shampooing the carpet image God? The work of the home is nothing to be ashamed of. It is valuable, important work. It is necessary work. It is work that God sees as integral to his work in this world. In fact, because you bear his image, you are imaging him with every task you accomplish in your home on any given day. A task that does this clearly is when you bring order out of chaos. Let's think for a moment about how you, as a created being, bring order out of chaos in your work. You take a room that is cluttered and in disarray and organize it and declutter. Order out of chaos. You clean and disinfect a refrigerator that is growing things that are hardly edible. Order out of chaos. You sort, pretreat, wash, fold, and put away piles of laundry. Order out of chaos. With every ordinary task you do, you are bringing order into this chaotic world that we live in. While it might feel hardly God-like, I assure you that it is. God, staring at the vastness of time and space, spoke creation into existence out of nothing. God quiets storms to a whisper. And most of all, God in the flesh brings order to our chaotic souls by dying on the cross and giving us his righteousness. [...]

But even when we understand how doing daily chores images God, we see that our work doesn't always get done smoothly and easily. Life in a fallen world means bad things happen when the work doesn't get done. Life in a fallen world means thorns and thistles get in the way of finishing our daily chores. Our backyard regularly floods, leaving it uninhabitable for a garden or even grass. Mold grows in refrigerators. Last night's dinner is caked on dishes in the sink. And in our sin, we don't always have eyes to see how our work is doing God's work of bringing order out of chaos or caring for his creation. Frankly it just feels too mundane most days to be that grandiose. In a lot of ways these feelings of insignificance over the ordinary chores is the most devastating effect of sin on our work. Because we live in a culture that prizes the more physical aspects of the work of the home the least (over caring for children and even decorating), we feel the sinful devaluing of it acutely. It's harder to see a clean cabinet as valuable when it's not as culturally acceptable as signing your kid up for music lessons. This is all owing to the curse, isn't it? We take the good things that God has given us (work, the home, etc.) and make them seem pointless. But for those in Christ, the futility of ordinary chores isn't the end of the story. Our work is meant to be a means of loving God through loving our neighbors, so the greatest love we can show them (even the neighbors in our own home) is to bring some sense of order in a broken and chaotic world. Sometimes this looks like opening your home to a friend who is weary, and sometimes it looks like disinfecting the whole house after a stomach bug makes its way through." (pages 52-54).

Amen.

And one more to tie them together from Erin Napier in "Heirloom Rooms": "We recognize the humanity in a house: brokenness is not permanent, anything can be redeemed. Like people. I think that is why [...] I find the raw vacancy of a house hard to look at. In the same way it must take surgeons time to get used to the sight of the blood of their work, the sight of a ramshackle vacancy is unsettling to me. Houses are built with intention and personal preference; they are human creations that reflect human longing: living rooms and babies' rooms, kitchens, porches -- they are designed to keep us safe as we go about living and loving each other. And so, this book is an exercise in documenting the home where Ben and I first became a family, and I invited other friends and family to do the same in their homes. We have taken staged photos of our home before, and those pictures portray a version of the truth -- the most aesthetically pleasing truth. But people are not perfect, and neither are the homes that keep them. I asked these friends to photograph their rooms the way they actually live in them, unstaged, imperfect. I asked them to tell me what moments made their houses feel like family members, and I hope it will encourage you to do the same. It is not only perfection that is worth documenting, but what is personal. Your home does not look like a magazine article, and it was never meant to. It is an ever evolving heirloom keeping step with the humans who are the custodians of it."