Thursday greetings, everyone.
Last week we had a lovely visit with our college son, who is studying about three hours away from home. Over the years, we’ve had various local college students who we’ve adopted for a time into our family; last week, we got to visit with the family who’s done the same for our son. What a gift to share a dinner with them and their children. God’s people are everywhere.
The Part Where There’s an Essay: Moving Pictures
Last month, I took all the pictures off our walls.
We’ve lived in this home for over twelve years now, and I haven’t moved things around very much. When it was time to get our kitchen floor repaired and refinished, I saw it as a good opportunity to pull everything down and start again. Why leave the frames up to collect dust? I might as well shut them away upstairs, away from the mess, and when the time came, permit myself to mix things up.
I’ve tried doing this before, with little success. I would exert a halfhearted attempt, take a few things down, stand back, consider, and then ultimately put most things back where they came from.
As I finally made my way around the first floor of our home, experimenting with new arrangements, and mixing old with new, I was overcome with gratitude.
The old:
a framed picture of our five kids: a shot of just the boys’ legs beside a yawning toddler sister, seated on the sidewalk beside them
a framed piece of original linocut work by my college roommate
the long, narrow painting by a local artist of one of our favorite street fronts in Charlotte
The new:
some new framed candids of the family, including this one, requested by the most distraught person pictured:
a painting of a white stag, a gift from my daughter
a framed version of one of my favorite quotes from George Eliot’s Middlemarch
I am blessed to live a full, interesting, and varied life. A very tiny bit of this is captured on the walls of our home. The mountaintop highs of vacation memories or aspirational quotes are balanced out by less picturesque moments of grief, pain, and longing in my memory.
People often quote Chesteron’s musing “The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.” To be sure, parenting is remarkably ordinary—sometimes dismally so. But all of those ordinary days string together into a steady strand. The day-in, day-out jobs of baths, books, sweeping the floor, breaking up arguments, and mopping up scraped knees gradually give way.
To be sure, the later years have metaphorically scraped knees of their own, and they linger longer, with more stubborn scars.
But I am grateful for how God has lent grace to our ordinary, extraordinary days, making them a testimony to our frailty and His faithfulness. Looking back on these framed days, and remembering the ones that aren’t, cause me to hope for the future.
Psalm 37:3 - Trust in the LORD, and do good; dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.
For the Anglophiles
This weekend, a few lucky guests will stay the night in the beautiful library at St. Paul’s Cathedral. The real surprise here is that you get breakfast with an AirBnB.
Reads & Listens of the Week
One of my most anticipated books of the year is now available for preorder: The Mythmakers from John Hendrix. John has been working on this one for A SWEET FOREVER, and it’s finally here. On that topic, here’s some late-breaking news about Tolkien’s poetry.
As long as we’re talking new books, Leif Enger’s new one is almost here, also. Just the title makes me happy: I Cheerfully Refuse.
We loved the movie The Holdovers—we’ve already watched it twice—and were excited by the Oscar win of star Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Here’s a nice commentary on the film from World: An Argument for Being Bored Together.
Last week a dear friend all but ruined my Monday morning by sending me these statistics on how many—or rather, how few—books people read. Let’s try to skew these statistics, friends! I am here to recommend more books all the time—just ask me!
The more we love any that are not as we are, the less we love as men and the more as God. -John Saltmarsh