Many years ago, I noticed that the china pattern young women chose when they were married consistently matched their master bedroom décor. As soon as a young wife could afford to buy sheets or fabric for curtains or otherwise begin to decorate the master bedroom, I could see this pattern emerge. Whether she had only one cherished teacup, teapot, or plate that she loved, or had been lucky enough to choose her own china, you could carry that plate or teacup into the bedroom and set it on the bed, and see who that young woman was, in part, by the patterns and colors there. Every time I noticed this and pointed it out to my young friends, they acted surprised. “Wow!” they’d say, “I never realized that!”
We manifest outwardly what is true inwardly; I was reminded of this through Virginia Satir’s description of the nurturing family. We take who we are and sprinkle it liberally around us. When who we are is dark, we put dark around us. We have dark on our tables. We have dark in our beds. There is dark in the bathroom. There is dark in the family room. Even if there is only one room in the house, it is dark if we’re dark.
Look around. What do you see? What does your environment say? Do you love it? Walk through your house, around the place where you live. How does it feel? How do you think it feels to an outsider? What’s the substance and reality of it? What stories does it tell?
Years ago, we built a new home. My husband, a builder, told me “draw what you want,” and so I was privileged enough to be able to draw what I wanted. We built a house that would fit all our children, and host family dinners, missionaries home on furlough, or exchange students, perhaps more children, or refugee families needing a new start in America. We took all the love we had felt from our grandparents and we built it into our house, with its broad porches and warm, yellow siding, and its clay-red sidewalks, reminiscent of their homes which we spent so much time in as children. We waited to buy furniture that we loved, so for a long time rooms have been imperfect, half-done, and even empty.
As our house filled with things, its character took shape. You can walk into our house and see who we are. In the entry, for instance, the first thing you see is a very old icon of St. Gabriel, the patron saint of communication. He is my favorite archangel, the one announcing good news, the one who says “the Lord is near!” He’s the patron saint of writers, too. If I could take only one item out of my house during a house fire or an impending tornado, I would take this icon. I love my entry way, because it’s full of a repeated pattern of arches and curves, circles and communication. It says “welcome in the name of the Lord.”
One year I noticed that most of the house was done, but that our master bedroom was ugly. It was full of odds and ends, furnished with leftover furniture from our old guest room. This room I had lovingly furnished and decorated for the young woman who lived with us while finishing school, a young woman I had met at a local restaurant and who had been my waitress. A young woman who later became my daughter. Another story for another time.
I had bought beautiful, antique Chippendale furniture from an antiques dealer on eBay and had decorated this extra room for our young friend in a most beautiful way. But when we moved, we did away with the guest room, and moved whatever was an odd-and-end into the master bedroom of our new house. And there we lived, in what devolved into a messy, brown-walled, mis-matched master bedroom while the rest of my house received all the attention, and looked, when clean, like you could put it Mary Englebright’s Home Companion. My home was (and is) that warm.
But the master bedroom. What a mess. And what of its inhabitants? In truth, we matched our bedroom. When we moved, my husband and I moved into a home that was larger than we were, yet God was asking us to expand our tent pegs, as he called ancient Israel to do. And, like old Israel, we weren’t ready. Moving into the land flowing with milk and honey became a training ground, even a battlefield. We had this large bounty and blessing, and we were smallish people. We knew how to live with little and had made a religion of it, but we didn’t know how to live with much.
We were, in fact, peasants who had money. We had grown up in rich in belongings but poverty-stricken with regard to love. My husband’s father died an alcoholic, a warm, good-humored cowboy who was one of the most benignly neglectful men I’ve ever met. And sometimes he wasn’t so benign. He once gave a shot of rum or bourbon to my husband when my husband was only three years old. He and his buddies were sitting around drinking, when his little son asked for a drink. “I’m thirsty,” he whined. “Here, try this!” his dad laughed, and shoved a shot glass into his little boy’s hands. My husband still remembers drinking it greedily, and then the pain and burning of the alcohol in his throat. They all roared with laughter as that little boy screamed and clawed at his throat. You’ll never tell your dad “I’m thirsty” again, after something like that.
In our families of origin, we became Good Children and Hero children whose job it was to make the family look good, look successful, while never having to work at actually being good, or being successful human beings. We were human doings. We did not fight back. We did not take the first or biggest portions. We, in fact, let other needier, louder, more demanding siblings get all the good stuff. We waited patiently, believing that good things come to those who wait.
We waited a long time, and the good things we longed for never came from our families of origin. We had to grow a new family, and fill our own family with good stuff. And by God’s grace, we did.
God saw us growing, and one year he asked us to build a house. “Fill it with all manner of good things,” he said. This is the home of the beloved. Whether small or large, that home reflects the life of God in its inhabitants. It must. It must reflect.
And reflect, it did. We could see, after we moved, just how impoverished parts of us remained. My husband and I were willing to live with empty rooms everywhere else in our house, rather than just filling them up 
with junk. I hated the junk rooms. I couldn’t stand to put my children in junk rooms. I couldn’t stand to put the girl who was my waitress and then became my friend and then became my daughter in a junk room. But I myself was willing to live in a junk room, an ugly room, a room-you-hate-being-in room. This was what we designed for our Divine Couple.
How wrong we were. In our families of origin, children never came first. Parents always came first. We over-corrected that problem and grew a couple whose children always came first, who always came last themselves. It was time for a correction, and we became aware of the need for change the day we realized with a start that we were living like paupers in a beautiful home, where every other space was comfortable, but ours.
So we fixed that problem, and by fixing it we began to continue in a new way to fix ourselves. We went all the way back to “not worthy” and we fixed so much of the vestiges of what our parents gave us. No, not all. I doubt it will ever be all fixed, because after all we must go back as far as our most ancient ancestors. That’s a lot of fixing! That’s a lot of manifesting the grace of God. That’s a huge need for salvation, right there. It might take Acts of God to fix that.
But we began to fix it again, and do more of it. Because parents like ours, who gave their children the message “you are not as important as the grownups in this family” are no worse than parents who give their children the message “you are more important than the grownups in this family.” As Jesus said, the student is not above the master. You can’t heal in the Other what you haven’t healed in yourself.
So today I’m thinking about what remains of my orphan heart. I continue to love my husband and try to help him heal his orphan’s heart, too. I look around my dinner table and I see all the stages of healing reflected in my children’s open faces. I know we have love in our family. We can see love in the walls, and in the pots and pans, and in the sheets on our beds, and the chairs we sit in. I see a lot of love, everywhere.
And of course I also see messy. I see clutter. I see Old Stuff That Must Be Gotten Rid Of. Most of the Old Stuff is hidden, now, but I know where it is! And so, in the interest of wholeness and love, week by week I throw out junk. I throw out what isn’t needed. I give it away, if it’s worthy. Sometimes I break it, if it carries a message that needs to be broken forever. Remind me to tell you about the Stuff I Broke.
As I look around, I see love. I see love for my children and my husband, and I see love for me. The love for myself has been a long time in coming, but I see it. I love my office I work in. I love the room I sleep in. I love the cup I drink tea from, even though it cost only $7.95 and came from Starbucks. I waited for that cup. And it was worth it, because it shows something about who I am: It says “I love you” on it.
So today, I invite you to look around. What do you see? How does it make you feel? What does it make you think? Are you surrounded by love? If not, what junk do you need to get rid of?
Look and see. See what’s worthy, and what is not. And if it’s not worthy, why do you hang onto it? What does hanging on mean?
I invite you to tell a story about what you saw when you looked.
Juniper is a bright, lively, beautiful child. She’s what I call “twitchy,” and has a hard time being still unless she’s immersed in something that interests her. She speaks without thinking and interrupts others during conversation. She raises her hand and blurts out answers in her eagerness to please. And she loves to please. She’d do anything for anyone and is a willing and able student. But I feared more for her this year than for any of my other children, for she is a square peg and the holes are round, and I worried that her teacher would be a hammer.
So, in spite of the 12-page instruction hand-out for how to do fourth grade book reports, my husband and I sucked up our concerns and started the school year optimistically.
the basis for her funky cross mobile, I remained silent and restrained myself from getting my fingers on her school project. I’d already graduated from fourth grade; I had no plans of returning. And at the parent meeting for the other grades, they’d told us in no uncertain terms that parents were not to do their children’s school work. “If you’re tempted to do their crafts,” one teacher warned, “just make one for yourself. But keep your hands off. This is their assignment.” I had been warned; I knew my place.
string. I picked up the phone and called my daughter Ivy, a fourth grade teacher at a different parochial school. She’s my consultant when it comes to all things institutional, for she knows how schools work and she’s got my back and those of her siblings. She would steer us in the right direction, just in case my advanced degrees and experience as a mother weren’t enough for handling Miss Brown.
examine Miss Brown’s note and the string, everyone giving opinions about Miss Brown and her project. But Juniper is a dogged optimist and decided that she could do the work on her own. My husband, who works with projects all day but not with children, thought that she could do it, too. So I had Juniper get her materials together and demonstrate how she would do the mobile. It was clear that she didn’t have the tying skills or the knowledge of her materials needed to succeed. For instance, she wanted to color the hangers with a crayon, or use poster paint, neither of which would adhere to plastic or metal coat hangers. She was unable to manage the string very well, and the silly idea of putting bread in a bag to represent Jesus, the Bread of Life, threatened to send us all into paroxysms of eye-rolling. As we watched her struggle to do what her teacher said she should be able to do, I grew more and more upset. What is wrong with this woman? I wondered. She’s grading these children on their parents’ work! And I wasn’t going to be one of those parents.
discussed the night before. It was apparent from looking at the mobiles that Juniper couldn’t compete unless we did her work for her, or “with” her (i.e., did the work as she sat and watched). Finally, my decision made, I asked Miss Brown to grade Juniper’s original but trashed project, as tacky as it had been. “Although you said she’d made no effort, she actually did put a lot of effort into it,” I explained, “working over an hour on it. We’d like you to grade what she did and move on. Even if you give her an F, we are ready to move on. We’re all upset about your failing her twice this week, so let’s just make it official and go on.”
I looked Miss Brown right in the eye and firmly said, “No, Miss Brown, I am not going to ‘just help her tie the knots.’ Any help we give her will still not be acceptable, because nothing but a mobile with substantial parental work is going to pass muster, which is obvious by looking at these mobiles. You’re not grading the child’s effort, you’re grading the child on the work of the parents, and that’s a philosophical difference we have that isn’t going to be resolved today. Please grade her original project.”
shook and quailed and my heart ached for my bright, darling child whose teacher could see no beauty in a happy effort.
I think it is just as important for us to ask ourselves, “Where are you living life?” as it is to ask ourselves, “What life are you living?” I think this is true whether we consider our individual dwellings, or whether we consider the neighborhoods, towns, and cities in which we live. What is our community like? Do we even have one? Is it human? Is it soul-liberating and soul-nourishing, or is it impersonal, oppressive, a place that drives a person to more unconsciousness?
We played for hours inside this vacant house, and I dreamed of having my own home some day–for this is what that house was: a home. It was unlike the suburban home in which I spent my middle childhood, which had one of ten house plans from which residents of our neighborhood might choose. That house’s only saving grace was that it backed up to a wheat field bordering woods and a winding creek, where we spent the majority of our time as children. And it had attics one could stand up in; after we dragged wood planks upstairs and laid them across the studs, we had an attic hideout that was the envy of the neighborhood children.
Several years later, a friend recommended I read 
