faith Archives - Page 15 of 39 - Kristen Anne Glover

My House: A War Zone

It is 8:42 pm, and my house looks like a bomb went off. Inside-out and mismatched socks litter the living room floor, library books sprawl lazily across the couches, and thirty-two fingerprinty water glasses gather for a conference on the kitchen counters. The dishwasher needs filling and the laundry needs folding and five sets of teeth need to be inspected before they are sent off to bed.

When the last child has asked the last question before finally acquiescing to bedtime, I stand in my living room in a state of shell-shocked exhaustion, assessing the damages. Every surface of my home looks like it has suffered a direct hit, and I feel responsible, as if my home wouldn’t look so much like Ground Zero if I was just…better at this.

I didn’t keep up very well today. The house looks like a war zone, I sigh.

It looks like a war zone because it is a war zone.

The words crowd out my thoughts before I can stop them. It is a war zone, and you are at war.

I gasp, because I have forgotten. In my self-criticizing, I have forgotten all that I have done today to raise up a mighty little army and to equip them for battle. Now, at the end of the day, my house reflects the effort that has gone in to the more important task of preparing my children for war.

It’s just that it doesn’t seem like war when I hold my children on my lap and sit with them at their desks and serve them at the table. But it is. I do not like to look into their sweet, innocent little faces and think that they are engaged in a battle for their souls. But they are. I do not like to think that our enemy will stoop so low as to rob the cradle. But he does.

It is a war, and I must spend my days pouring truth into my babies, demonstrating love, and fighting against sin—both mine and theirs—because I only get one chance to arm them well. Already the enemy is noticing weaknesses, looking for chinks, and hoping I’m too busy cleaning the kitchen to notice them myself.

But I know that one day, they’ll have to face him alone. One day, I won’t be there to gird them up. So every day, we’re hauling out the armor, messing with swords, and building up defenses.

It makes an awful mess of the living room.

But then, war isn’t pretty. It is messy and exhausting. It requires so much focus, dedication, and perseverance that other things simply cannot get done. We don’t always have time to put the tanks back where we found them because we are just too busy keeping them loaded.

Some days, it’s all we can do to make sure everyone makes it out alive.

If my house looks like a war zone on those days, then let it be. Those are shields and swords littering the living room floor, not sippy cups and Nerf guns. This is a battleground, and I am raising an army.

Today, it just happens to look like it.

100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood, #? I have so lost track of numbers.

Rain Like Horses

The clouds mount up, dark and ominous, like great muscled stallions, ready for war. I stand in my yard on my dead grass and watch them, waiting.

A lightning bold jabs swiftly into the wounded sky, but I am too far away to hear it groan. All around me, those horses circle, thundering to the back of me and charging like a single, solid sheet to the front of me.

But my yard opens its yellowed mouth and not a drop falls in.

“That’s the thing about the desert,” I say to the kids. “It can be flooding in one part of town while the other part is bone dry.”

A single fat rain drop plummets to the ground and vaporizes on the burning cement. At least it could have fallen on the grass, I mumble to myself. I gaze up at the burning yellow orb hovering just above my house and I think about how much I really don’t want to water my lawn that night, and how much everything would be so much better if it would just rain, even a little.

I have lived in the desert just long enough to know that here, the earth holds its breath for rain. Days and weeks go by without a drop, then all of a sudden God throws open the gates of heaven and lets his steeds run free. They thunder down to the earth with the sound of a thousand hoof beats, and are gone.

The grass is watered and the cacti flower and the people in the puddles are reminded that there is a God in heaven who causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike. But on the other side of town, where the horses didn’t run, the people stand on parched ground and wonder why God held back the reigns for them.

I looked at the spot where the raindrop fizzled. “I should be grateful for that drop,” I chastise myself. Even one drop is better than nothing.

Another drop falls. It is not exactly a war horse, but I get out a wash bin and put it under the eaves as an act of faith. Maybe it will rain enough to drip off the shingles so I can water the flowers tucked under the roof, close to the house.

Then the horses come, slowly at first, as if to find their way, then charging in at full force. The waters fill my pathetic little wash bin and trample the thirsty grass. I put another bucket out, and another, but those are overflowing before I can grab any more.

God has let his cavalry run right through my backyard.

I run too, trying to collect all the water I can because tomorrow, it will be dry again. Tomorrow, the rain will stop and I’d better be smart enough to get it while I can.

But I can’t contain it. I do not have enough empty containers to fill with the water that is pouring down on my house. I dump hand-me-down shoes out of plastic storage bins and fill those too, but the rain keeps coming and I am soaked.

It rains all day. Then the next. And the next. Great pools of water form in the hollows of the desert. The horses rush together in a foaming frenzy and course through dry riverbeds in a blur of motion. Everything that was empty has been filled up; everything that was dry has been saturated.

And I am out in my yard with buckets and bins, looking every bit like a widow who has cared for a growing boy through famine years, who thinks her son might die even while filling every last vessel in her home with oil while a prophet pours.

I am ashamed, just a little, at my attempts to hoard God’s provision as if I would run out. The water drips down my hair and off my chin, it gathers in herds in my yard, and there I stand in the rain, trying to save a bit of it in a blue plastic bin.

Here I am, with all my jars filled, and I realize something about God that I should have known before: I should fear overflowing more than I fear running out. God does not run out.

I do.

I have limited his hand because my mind tells me what God can do and my faith doesn’t have the guts to disagree.

I stand in the rain, drenched to the core, and I am reminded that God is not limited by my limitations. He is able to do exceedingly, abundantly, more than I could ever ask or imagine. He can command the horses of heaven to charge swiftly through the desert. He can make oil flow from clay jars.

He can even refine a rain-soaked child with just one lick of fire.

The rain is still coming, and I nothing to put out except the jar that is cracked and brittle, the one that I hold back because I don’t believe it can ever really be full. But it’s under the eaves today, and the rain is coming faster than the cracks can let it out.

It is raining horses, and I am overflowing.

Home

In my mind, I live in house that has stood longer than I have, built by hands that lived before my time. The floor creaks and the stairs are warped from generations of feet climbing up and down, softly wearing their reflections into the wood.

Ancient trees reach out arthritic hands to knock on the windows when the winds blow up, and out in the orchard, I can spend hours under gnarled apple trees and watch as the fruit swells fat and ripe. Decades have passed since shovels broke the dirt and turned the soil and sank saplings into the earth as a kind of security for the years to come.

This place, this home I imagine, is a place of generational blessing, where babies are nursed in the same rooms they grow up in, and the same rooms they sleep in when they come back with children of their own. Here, change is never sudden and new is measured in years, not hours or minutes. Each passing season brings a deepening in me—a peaceful settling in, the way a house settles in to the earth until it’s hard to tell where one begins and the other ends.

I long to be home like that, where home is a part of me, like the skin I live in.

But I’ve never had that.

And I never will.

All my life, I have been transplanted just as soon as the roots have started to wriggle deep into the soil. Once a handful of memories are created, they are packed up and moved on to a new place that doesn’t feel like mine, that doesn’t feel like me.

And every single time, I feel like a bit of plankton, floating about in a great big sea, with no idea what part of the blue is up, and what part of the blue is down, and all I want to do is plant myself somewhere for a great long time.

But the waves won’t let me.

It is my calling, and I know it, to be always a stranger, always a sojourner, always longing for a place to return to that does not exist. In a sense, everywhere is home, and nowhere, all at once.

My heart breaks over it sometimes. I want a place of my own, a little corner of the earth to claim and tame, subdue and improve. I want a little kingdom here, and I grieve when I realize that I will not have it, that my children will not have it.

There is no house. There is no land. There are no generational memories to make or keep and no spreading fruit trees by which to mark the seasons. There is no home.

At least, not here.

But on the other side of time and space there is a haven for my homeless heart. “I go to prepare a place for you,” He said, and my heart leaps when I read the words because I am a woman without a place. Those words are a precious promise to someone like me.

Just for a minute, I close my eyes and forget my wanderings, so I can see it. Nestled in among ancient trees is a house built by the Father who desires to be my rest. The staircase is worn smooth by the feet of the One who waits for me, His Bride, to come home, to be home. I think there must be moss on the garden stones and a fire on the hearth and a thousand memories held in by the walls, as if I have been there all along because it was meant for me, all along.

It is home.

All the longings of my earthly shell, every godly dream left unfulfilled, is there perfected and redeemed. Not a single sacrifice or service has gone unnoticed. It is all repaid in glorious abundance and loving detail. Even the waiting breaths, the questioning and tearful prayers, the years of doubts and fears and unrealized dreams—are there restored to me as if none of it was ruined or wasted.

Home. It is a true home from which I can never be uprooted Nothing can steal away the memories I’m storing up there, because all of it, past, present, and future, is built into that place. All of it is part of the story of that place, that home, and I am a piece of it. There will be no good-byes, no pulling away, no awkward beginnings, only—always—belonging.

This hope of heaven, this hope of home, is so glorious that even a small taste of it is better than anything I’ve found on earth. I must believe that if my wanderings leave me longing for heaven and dissatisfied with earth, then let me wander, and let me ache.

For surely, it is better to ache for heaven than to be content with earth.

Surely, it is a gift of God to wander anywhere that leads me closer to home.

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