My House (God's House?)

I was hoping we could spend some time together. Though it would be nice to go somewhere and talk by a warm fireplace and I get to know you just a little better, that’s not what I’d like to do. Instead, I’d like you to come to my house. It’s not really my house, you can’t even touch it with your hands, but it’s a house I’d like to live in. I’ve spent a lot of time there lately, getting to know the place, exploring, but I still haven’t moved in. The invite is there, waiting for me to accept, but it’s a very big step to move in with your beloved, especially when you are still getting to know him.
The house I am talking about is God’s house. It is a place where I have started to go when I need to talk with God on his own turf; when I need to see the world from his perspective. I don’t see the world the same way most of you do. That doesn’t make me better, in fact some days I think it is more of a curse. It just means I have to work very hard to see the world from your perspective. Sometimes, I need a change of pace.
The world that I live in is one that is very symbolic. Every attribute of something means something. When I am wearing polyester, I am usually feeling manmade (haven’t decided if that’s a bad thing yet). When I eat cookies, I am feeling at home, when I drink lemonade, I probably don’t like you. It has made interacting very difficult, but I am learning how to do it.
Back to my house...the house? God’s house. God has shown me one room of his house at a time. I don’t get a guided tour. I see the rooms as I need them. So far, he has shown me four. Why don’t I give you the guided tour of this house and maybe you will be as blessed by it as I am. Come in the door and turn around. This is the entry to the house. The door is huge but at the same time small. When size would intimidate me, it is just big enough for me to fit through. When I know and welcome that I am in the presence of greatness, it is big enough for a giant. It is handcrafted with love by my Father. He built this house for every one of his children to call home, but they’re only home when I’m okay with it.
The door is big and solid and creaks when you open it because of all the years it has been the gateway to this house. It has windows in it so I can still see the outside world but it is solid enough that that world can’t get through on those days when it hurts. You would expect the stone tile floor to be cold and harsh to the touch, but the huge shag rug welcomes me, even beckons me. There’s a huge closet in the entry and it has a whole lot of shoes in it. Some of them shoes I wore when I was a kid, some of them shoes my parents wore that I might try on someday. All of them are shoes that mean something to me. I haven’t figured out why yet, but there aren’t any coats or hats in the closet, just shoes and black marks where some have been kicked off in a mad rush to curl up with Dad.
The entry way takes you into the main part of the house. It is huge and open like some of those houses you see on Home Makeover, but the areas are separated just enough that when you can’t handle one room, you can take solace in another. We’ll start at the left and work our way around the same way I found them.
First we have the healing room. It’s kind of like a sunroom, but last time I checked, there are windows in sunrooms and they aren’t rough hewn and made out of stone. So I guess it’s not like a sunroom. Either way, it is the first room I found in the house. When I walk into the room, I am always astounded by how big and small the room seems at once. It is big enough that God in his giantness can be comfortable here, but small enough that one person trying to hide from the world can feel secure. The floors are made of huge stones, something like you would expect the dwarves of folklore to have carved but so large, they would have had to work with Giants to move them. The masonry was done by a master, someone who really knew what they were doing and had all the time in the world to make sure it was done right. When I’m sitting in here, I feel like it is a fortress where nothing that hurts can get through.
There is a massive fireplace on the far wall. It’s big enough that I could probably sit in it and spread my arms out and just touch the sides of it. There is always a fire crackling here. The pop and snap of the sparks is comforting, like the chaff that gets burned away in the refiner’s fire, but it’s not my chaff. The logs burn eternally. It never needs to be stoked. It just keeps going, and when I need to, I can come and warm my hands on the flames. When the world has been so cold that my soul is worn, I can have the permeating glow refresh me. I don’t even have to say anything when I come here. Dad knows when I’ve come and he comes and sits with me and pulls me into his lap and wraps his arms around me and lets me cry when I need to, sigh when I need to or whatever else my soul needs at the time to leave the world behind and come home.
When I am ready, and sometimes that’s sooner than I think, he takes my feeble hand in his and takes me over to the table. It’s a massive stone table, carved just as masterfully as the stones in the floor and the fireplace. The warmth of the fire keeps it from being cold to the touch so it is a warm and inviting place. There are two chairs at this table. One is a massive wooden chair with leather upholstering on the seat and back. The timbers that were used to make it were probably massive cherry trees and haven’t been cut down that much. It kind of looks like those chairs you see in the movies about medieval times that the Lord of the house sits in. You can imagine who gets to sit in this one. The other is less ornate. Just the right size for any of us human folk, it is for the guest of the healing. Anytime someone needs to come here so I can say something to them or give something to them or have them see me give something away, they get this chair. It’s a smaller version of the other with less carving and detail but still just as masterfully made.
I don’t usually sit down at this table. I like to spend as little time as possible here (I’ll tell you a little bit more about why later) and sitting down just makes you want to get comfortable and stay. I don’t rush the work we do here, but I don’t want to stay any longer than I have to. We tend to use the table because I can take my emotions and the hurts and relationships I have and we can put them on the table and look at them. I can choose to pick them up and touch them and explore them a little if that’s what I need, or I can pass them to someone else to have them look at it. Sometimes I give it to God because I am having trouble releasing it and he puts it somewhere where I can’t find it and sometimes I give it to my guest. Usually, that is only so I can see why they don’t need it and I can give it to God.
I learned here that my feelings have texture. Guilt and shame were compacted by years of ignoring them into a solid ball, kind of like a fishing weight, and it sucked the energy out of me the longer I held on to it. I put it on the table and tried to give it to the people who I held responsible for it and they already knew how much it hurt to touch it so they wouldn’t pick it up. I gave it over to God and he put it somewhere and I’ve never seen it since.
The goal of the healing room is not to spend my day wallowing in the past and the hurts. The goal is to be cleansed and freed of them so I can walk purely into the throne room. That is the next room. This is a place of Glory. I can come here with all of my baggage and when I’m not doing what God wants of me, but usually, He will ask me to come back to the healing room with Him if I try. He doesn’t demand it and I only go to the healing room when I’m ready, but he asks that I be clean before coming to the throne room. This is the room where I fulfill my purpose in creation: adoring my Lord and Saviour. I fall on my face and worship Him. The angels are here and I can see them singing, but I can’t hear them in the usual sense. They are singing but it is directed at God so it can only be heard by Him. I am blessed by it and my soul is encouraged to join in, but I can’t really hear it.
The floors here are made of marble tile; they are white with grey marbling. There are flecks of gold and silver in the tile as well. When you come into the room, the throne is to the left, the angels are straight in front of you and the cross is to the right. There are massive stone pillars on either side of the throne and there are other people here who have been through the healing room and have come to fulfill their purpose. They lay prostrate to the throne, worshipping the Lord of al creation. There are others here, bent at the foot of the cross. They haven’t found the healing room yet because they have just found the reason for all of this being here. As each one realizes the gift that was given to them, God puts a comforting hand on their shoulder and invites them to the healing room when they’re ready.
For me, I am here for the throne. I don’t throw myself down in prostration anymore like I did when I first found the throne room. I come in and I kneel. I try to keep both the throne and the cross in sight. It’s hard with them being on both ends of the room. I keep asking God to move them closer together, but he said he built it this way for a reason. I am okay with not knowing that reason and trusting that I am here to worship. I used to get an overwhelming adrenaline rush when I came to the throne room. I would look at how many people were here and how much room there was and say “Wow, I should bring a whole bunch of people here so they can see this too!” But now I know that it is not me that brings people to this room but God. People will see me go into this house and see the peace I go out into the world with and God will speak to their hearts and ask them if they want some too. That is how I will bring people into this throne room: by living each moment trying to retain the peace that I find in the healing room and the love that I feel in the throne room.
I mentioned earlier that I spend as little time as possible in the healing room. That is because, though it is wonderful when I am cleansed and freed of something, it is a means to an end. The things we are working on in the healing room are to make it easier to stay in the throne room. When I enter the healing room, I know good work is going on and I want to work through it quickly because I know I get to be in the throne room next and it will be so much better.
This brings me to the third room which I found last week. It is not so much of a room as the yard. There is a terrace in the northeast corner of the house which leads out to gardens that go on forever. The main thing here is what I call the Journey. All of us start out in life on a path. It may be one that is seemingly already laid where someone has walked it before and actually put a pathway down that looks like a bike path, or it may be a path full of briars where everywhere we turn, the nettles are poking us and the vines are cutting us. It could be a path that has not been laid out but has been made easier by the Father. This path looks more like a lawn that has been trimmed and manicured but goes off in the distance so far that you don’t know where it leads. Each of us starts out on one of these paths. They run side by side with a chain link fence between them. The fence is high enough that you can’t climb over it so the only way to go from one path to another is through the gates along the way. You can cross through as many times as you like and often times you don’t know which one you are going to. I have walked all of the paths at different times in my life. I tend to stay away from the briars now, but the pathway is on the left, the lawn is on the right and the briars are in the middle so when I want to cross from the path that is hewn to the place that is not, I have to go through the briars.
Now, you’re probably wondering why someone wouldn’t just stay on the path for their entire life. There’s something you should keep in mind here. The cement pathway may already be laid, but think back to the last time you walked on concrete? How long were you able to go before your knees hurt? Eventually your ankles and your hips would bother you too. The spine is never a happy camper with that. But what happens when you take your shoes off and walk on the grass (not the stuff that grows in hard clay. We’re talking soft ground with lots of peat)? The shock on your bones isn’t so bad. You can walk longer. The only problem with the grass is you have no idea where it goes or what path you will take to get there. Sometimes it will go forward, sometimes you will double back to relive an experience. You never know where you are going or how long it will take you to get there. The thing that I can never keep in the front of my head is that these paths all lead to the same place. At the end of our journey, we will all come to the throne room. The path meanders out the back way until it comes in the side door, straight into the throne room where we will stand in worship for all time with no need of the healing room or the garden. For some reason, I can never remember that when I’m getting frustrated with the path I’m on.
Last time I went to the house, we were working in the garden. I was struggling with the path I have taken. God wanted me to use the gate to cross over to the lawn, but Richard is on the concrete and I have been too so he was basically asking me to go through the briar to get there and be where I can’t see Richard anymore. I’m probably going to find out that Rich isn’t on the concrete path, that he’s really on the lawn, but we’ll see how that pans out. This one is taking a little bit longer than usual. By the time we finished working, God had changed gears. We were in a new room. We had gone back in the house and now we were in the kitchen. I’m still not sure what the significance of that is, but that’s where I am. The kitchen is in the center of the house. That’s why I said it’s like one of those home makeover houses, because the kitchen is in the center of the house and all of the rooms come off of the kitchen. When you want to go from the healing room to the throne room, you have to go through the kitchen. From the throne room to the garden, through the kitchen. I don’t usually notice the kitchen because the purpose is not to be in the kitchen. The purpose is to get to whatever room I need to be in to accomplish the task at hand. This time, we stopped in the kitchen. What God has told me so far is that he wants me to stay here for a while. I have always been about the room I am going to. I have always had to have a destination. He is asking me to live here, Right where I am, to enjoy this moment, these people and these circumstances. I spend my life planning for the future. I spend hours making spreadsheets and flow charts laying out how I am going to reach my goals and I never actually enjoy this moment, the beginning of those goals. He has brought me to the kitchen and asked me to do nothing. That is my act of worship at this moment.I hope my world makes just a little bit more sense to you now and I hope you can benefit from God’s house. It doesn’t make sense to everyone and it doesn’t help everyone, but maybe it will show you something more about yourself, God or possibly even me that will make your life a little bit easier to live and bring you that one step closer to God. I hope that someday I will see each and every one of you in God’s House, singing with the angels

Moving on

Mama Bear and Baby Bear. Oh the moments I've missed. She's a beauty isn't she? And that was 5 years ago.