home is where your smocklings are: a lesson on 1 john 2.15

so, when did our beautiful and beloved home turn into a hell-hated pignut? let me just tell you, smockdaddy and i have had all sorts of hell selling our old house. and, when i claim "old" i don't mean old, i mean the one we no longer live in. the one we moved out of over two years ago. whatever. it has been one major buttkick after another and i am not ashamed to admit that it has driven me to drink on more than one occasion.

the true problem is that we spent seven years building that house into our ideal dream home -- all kinds of custom wooden cabinetry, floors, and bookshelves. we even added a ginormous study to it. we nurtured a prayer garden, beautiful beyond belief, complete with an amazing meditation fountain. you name it, if it was an upgrade, we put it into that house. we poured our hearts into, and had three of our smocklings in, that home. we hated to let it go.

so, then we had the brilliant idea of keeping it as a rental property. let me just say this: if you ever want to have a little rental property as an investment on the side, first of all, do not love that house. you will cringe with true physical pain with every tenant who burns a hole in your wooden flooring, rips the doors off your custom built cabinets, tears out the wooden blinds, or absconds with the coolio doorknobs after having lived in your home for two months rent-free. secondly, try to have the voodoo foresight to know that the worst housing financial crisis in decades is not looming right around the corner.

after having dumped beaucoup bucks, sweat and tears into maintaining this house, it finally looks like we may be selling it -- monday. we've done everything short of bribing saint joseph to help us get it sold. yes, he was even buried upside down in our old prayer garden for what seemed like forever! but, as an act of faith that all will go well tomorrow, i unearthed him this weekend.

after walking through this empty, vacant, hollow home, my footsteps bouncing off wooden floors and naked walls, i went out to the prayer garden to get saint joseph. i stood under the tree we had planted there and cried because i was so happy that we're finally going to be out from under the financial burden of paying two mortgages and the emotional burden of constantly showing and promoting it and reading realtor feedback about why people don't like the house i love so much. i wept because we were giving away -- and in this market, that's exactly what we're doing, my friend -- the house that i have loved for nine years. the house that heard the tears and laughter of all six of our children. the hearth where we warmed ourselves and enjoyed so many major milestones.

this may seem ridiculous to those who've enjoyed family homes for ten or twenty years, or maybe even their whole lives; but you see, i've never experienced that. part of being a nomadic texan is being uprooted every few years or so. the seven years we lived in that house were the longest i have ever lived in any one house. it was the first house that i've ever had that i felt like i could really and truly call home. and i loved that home. the home where duncan learned how to ride a "real bike" and glynnis wrote her first short story, grace drew her first masterpiece, gabby took her first steps, and our smocktwins were born.

so we come to i john 2.15. love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. as i stood with bittersweet tears in the prayer garden this verse came to mind. i know the verse is, first and foremost, a commission to love God above all things, but standing there crying i couldn't help but think of it as a sensible and gentle caveat. do not become too attached to the things of this world because it'll hurt like hell when you have to leave them behind.

in order to focus on the joy of the situation, i thank God that we had that house -- maybe not as long as we had it -- but that He showered us with many blessings while we were there.