How much is enough?

"Modern apartments" proclaims a classic old building in a nearby town--though I wonder if by today's standards they are "modern." Okay, they do have "modern" satellite dishes! My town has a similar “transformed” hotel, once our town’s grandest, multi-storied and classy. Now the aging building is bare-necessities apartments for low-income seniors or the disabled. For many, that’s “home”—and even “home enough.” 

As I considered this area’s rental housing market, I recalled what I called "home" after leaving the family home where I grew up. I lived in basements, doubtful neighborhoods, and with many different roommates.  Many places had no washer or dryer, so I took weekly trips to the public laundry, where I read books and wrote letters as the machines chugged. It certainly beat having to swish my laundry in the creek and hang things on bushes to dry! (Okay, I never did that.) One blessing of that time was an invitation from a godly senior in my church (I worked with her son at the daily newspaper) to do my weekly two loads at her home Friday nights while we shared combined leftovers for dinner. I insisted on leaving her my "laundry change" to help with expenses. But it was a pittance for the riches she poured into my life as she prayed with me (and for me), shared her own spiritual growing places, and nudged me toward a deeper walk with God.

 A few years later, a major life change landed me more than a thousand miles away in Los Angeles, where I was a "missionary" at a major mission headquarters. With my "support" income of half or less of my former wage as a newspaper reporter, housing became a challenge. I first rented a room in a private home, then house-sat for an older lady, and finally got into a tiny apartment in an old building, where I “worked off” part of my rent with yard work and maintenance.

The apartments had just the bare necessities: no modern amenities like a dishwasher or microwave. One noisy old coin-op washer and dryer served the entire five-unit apartment building. But it was a place where I could practice hospitality and reach out to people in need who lived in the adjacent units.

At that time, Isaiah 54:2 became especially meaningful to me:

Enlarge the place of your tent;

Stretch out the curtains of your dwellings, spare not;

Lengthen your cords,

And strengthen your pegs.

Written to a culture that used tents for housing, this section predicted that when the exiled nation finally returned to its homeland, it would grow and prosper. The “message” I got for my circumstances was to refuse to isolate myself and shrivel up socially because of less-than-"perfect" housing. Instead, I was to accept my “location” as an opportunity to “stretch out” and be a difference-maker among the people who were then part of my life.

Today, when I look back over photos from the nearly two years I lived there, I don’t think much about what the units “lacked,” but of friendships forged. I befriended an immigrant couple (and with my fractured Spanish helped the wife buy a used sewing machine), encouraged an older widowed neighbor with health issues (oh, how her faith blessed me!), and helped another neighbor get emergency mental health treatment. I also took in two women in desperate situations for a few weeks, one of us sleeping on an old couch.

My “tent” wasn’t very big, but it was big enough for God’s purposes. He knew what I needed, and I tried to be a good steward of His gift of housing at that season of my life.

One more thought: "Home" for the last 35 years has been a small "starter" home where every square foot counts. Yet it, or any of the no-frills apartment where I once lived, would still be a palace to the thousands upon thousands facing starvation in Africa's historic famine. Or, for that matter, for most of the world.

Not perfect, but better

When my husband dragged the old dresser off his truck after yard-saling, my first reaction was “ugh”! Painted a sick dark green, missing knobs, gouged, and full of stickers and marker-pen graffiti, it was a sight. But we’d already decided to join our neighbor in holding a yard sale, so I took on the task of making it “marketable.”  After washing it down, I primed and then painted it.  We found enough matching knobs.  Behold, it was soon ready for a second life. Not perfect, but better.

As I worked away, I thought how it might illustrate how Jesus redeems us from “ugh” lives marred and damaged by sin. Paul wrote about the process in 2 Corinthians 5:17:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come.

The analogy isn’t perfect, however. The dresser got an exterior makeover with paint, but Jesus works through transformation, from the inside out:

We...are being transformed into his [Jesus’] likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:18)

My parents gave me this

butterfly necklace when

I graduated from a one-year

intensive Bible school course.

The word “transformed” comes from the Greek metamorphoo, which of course is related to the English word for “metamorphosis” in the insect world. After a brief life consumed with “consuming,” a caterpillar is enveloped in an ugly sac called a chrysalis. Within it, the caterpillar transforms to a butterfly, finally emerging into a new life. No wonder that this amazing process eventually became a symbol for the spiritual reality of being “born again.”

Jesus, in fact, had some harsh words about religious leaders of His day who excelled at "pretend-religion." They tried to look good on the outside but had dark, wretched, proud, judgmental hearts. He didn’t win any popularity contests with them, especially when He called them “whitewashed tombs,” pretty on the outside but full of death inside (Matthew 23:27-28).

I won’t say my refurbished dresser was totally “pretty on the outside.” It was still an old, scarred dresser.  But it had a second chance at being useful. And that’s just like God.  No matter how beat up and scarred we get from our bad choices and the inevitable hard places in life, He can still renew and use us. 

The rest of the story on the dresser?  A woman driving by our home a few days before the sale noticed it with its dangling price tag amidst other sale items we were gathering in the driveway. She was putting her 90-something mother in a care home and it was just what she needed as she prepared the room. 

That place of quiet rest

There’s something about a shade-dappled pond that simply speaks “peace,”  maybe as a faint shadow of the original, perfect Eden. As I came across this pond at the arboretum adjacent to the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho, the hymn title, “Near to the Heart of God” slipped into my heart. The tune stayed with me for a few minutes as I walked back to the car.

There is a place of quiet rest, near to the heart of God;

A place where sin cannot molest, near to the heart of God.

Every hymn has its “birth story,” and when I got home and looked up the background on this one, I realized how unspeakable pain brought forth enduring praise.  The author, Cleland McAfee, was a graduate of Park University in Parkville, Mo., which his father co-founded in 1875 with just seventeen students.  Cleland, his four brothers, and his only sister were all involved with the college. After Cleland’s graduation, he attended seminary, then returned to the college as chaplain and choir director.  For communion Sundays, he would write the words to a musical response that tied in with his  sermon theme.

One week, just before that communion service, Cleland’s brother Howard and his wife lost two small daughters to diphtheria within twenty-four hours. Their deaths shook the college and community. As Cleland meditated on psalms of comfort, he knew he needed to write another song than planned for that Sunday. His choir learned it at the Saturday night rehearsal, and then went to the grieving parents’ darkened, quarantined home. They sang it outside the house, then again that Sunday morning.

Cleland McAfee later became well-known his for scholarly theological writing, but more than a hundred years later it’s this song, written from a broken heart, for which he is best remembered.  Knowing “the rest of the story” of this century-old hymn has helped me appreciate the trusting heart that brought forth memorable lyrics.

The first verse, of course, goes to the “place of quiet rest.”  Verse two is about “the place of comfort sweet.”  Verse three, “the place of full release.”  Then, the affirming chorus:

O Jesus, blest Redeemer,

Sent from the heart of God,

Hold us who wait before Thee,

Near to the heart of God.

Lingering

I'm especially fond of a saying engraved on a resting bench at the University of Idaho (Moscow) arboretum:

The fragrance always remains in the hand that gives the rose.

When I “googled” it to find its author, I found décor sites offering plaques and other items with the quote. But I couldn’t find a definitive word of its author other than a quick reference to a mystic in an Eastern religion.

I still like it, because it says in metaphor what the Bible says in plain words: that when you reach out to people in encouragement and help, you bless them as well as yourself. Some of the verses that express that truth:

A generous man will proper; he who refreshes others will himself be refreshed. (Proverbs 11:25)

One man gives freely, yet gains even more; another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty. (Proverbs 11:24)

It is more blessed to give than to receive. (Acts 20:35, Paul, quoting Jesus)

If you had “all day,” I could tell you many stories of people who have given me the “rose” of encouragement and help.  Some that come to the top right now are associated with the tough mouths of recovery after I broke my ankle when I fell down some icy stairs. The timing was awful: my mother-in-law was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. We were taking her meals, helping with housework, supervising laundry, and of course had taken away her car keys.  She needed me just to function.

Then PLOP. My life reduced to days of pain and disability in the recliner. Meals came in.  Someone brought ice packs I could refreeze. Another picked up stamps and mailed packages for me. My closest friend determined to “be there” (for safety) the mornings I maneuvered onto a shower bench to bathe and wash my hair. When I went from a hard cast to a take-off cast, she knelt before me, helped shave my healing leg and trim my toenails. It was such a humble, touching time. I cried. In a few years I would be doing similar things for my mother-in-law as she lost control of bodily functions and could no longer feed herself. But the “fragrance remained” as I recalled how caring friends helped me in my “temporary disability.”

This saying is not about handing somebody a bouquet purchased at the local grocery store (though I’ve done that, too). It’s about giving something you cannot be repaid for. It’s about being the hands and feet of Christ in whatever tasks He puts before us. The “fragrance remains” because it is His.