Fats Domino & No Closets!

Life on this Saturday is different than before. The winds of change have blown again and the sounds of Fats Domino and homemade banana muffins fill the air.  I have moved into a rental house for a little while just a few blocks from my old apartment!  It is different and awesome.  My housemate  loves music (anything new, old , jazzy or the kind that makes you want to dance nostalgically across the floor) .  She likes cooking and I have enjoyed the eating of flavorful food, the late night conversations and even the moments of learning how to let go of “the way I always do things” and live out a longing I have had for a while to live communally in a small way. 

There is something really beautiful to me about creating a home where people of differences come together and learn how to live and love each other through frustrations, honest confessions, and awkward laughter.  It is a challenging kind of fun to learn to live in an unhidden, “This Is Me” kind of state.  It scares me in some ways to have someone know what I’m like in the morning and when I get angry.  It scares me to let someone know and feel the weight of living with someone with a disability that isn’t my blood family.  We are learning the good, the bad and the beautiful of each other and still learning to own our own freedoms and space when we need it.  It was time for me to step out of my own way of life.  I moved from an apartment that was accessible to all my wheelchair needs and was easy for me to live independently.  My new home is a chance for me to learn how to live in solidarity with an able bodied person.  I am learning to be ok with knowing what I need and asking for help, to be ok with accepting gifts of ramps being built on entrances, to be ok with someone else doing my laundry because I can’t go downstairs safely and to be ok to let my preferences fade into the background sometimes because in light of eternity is it really going to matter if I eat cheese and she doesn’t?? 

This house was built many years ago.  I just learned that a man in our city was born 93 years ago in this very house!  Lots of character and lots of rustic features make this a cozy,  little,  still–in-process  house on the Prairie.  One thing that is interesting to me is that there is no closet in any of the rooms!!!  How can two women live without a closet, you may ask??  Well, before you rush on out to Ikea  and try to give us ideas to buy something  or use your Pinterest account to tell me all the DIY things I could do…hear me out a bit!  I have been doing some contemplating on how attached I am to stuff and also how good we are as humans at hiding our mess behind  closed doors.  It may have been moving houses that stirred this up in me combined with a module of study in reading Richard Foster’s, Freedom of Simplicity. Either way, I desire to live a life in every way that is unattached to stuff and one that is open and doesn’t hide sin or even just the normal ordinary mess of being human.  No secrets—just a home and environment of safety and peace on the Way, a home of real, raw honesty with freedom to express anger, sadness, joy, love and longing!  It won’t be a perfect home and hasn’t been already.  There have been days where the awareness of my own sin and selfishness has had me calling out for Jesus to give me the grace and humility to let go of my own expectations of what I think home should be.  So the no closets? Maybe it’s a symbol of my own journey of coming out of hiding…of being free…of not being bound by sin and shame any longer?  No more hiding skeletons or messy sugar piles, just a desire for openness in His Presence first with the freedom to dance across the kitchen floor with whoever sits around the table with us.

So if you’re around stop in, friend!  Fats Domino, Billy Joel, Matt Corby or any number of worship songs may be playing on the Victrola.  We’ll put on the kettle and just be real and honest and you can always bet that we’ll make a place at our table for you.  Not to worry though because even though you can’t hang your coat in a closet, we do have a coat rack! Just a  no hiding, no shame in the mess just a place to be at peace and be pointed to where you really belong…because that…because He is HOME!