Back But Changed
My Amazon order history tells me that on July 10, 2021, I bought a bear bedspread for our guest bed. A few days earlier, I decided to get the guest bed out of the garage because it had been in there long enough. I’m a ‘use it or get rid of it’ kinda girl when it comes to storing clutter. (We initially moved said bed to the garage in March 2020 when Jeff unexpectedly became office buddies with me.)
Since we were cleaning the garage a little bit, Jeff also bought a shelving unit to make things a little tidier. I love that guy.
July 23 rolled around, we hosted a coffee-tasting shindig at our house, and a Gen Z-er asked if we knew of any rooms to rent.
We invited her to rent a room from us that weekend.
A majority of the stuff in the guest room closet fit on that nice new shelving unit. We took the doors off of our bedroom closet, we moved our dresser into that formerly-a-closet-now-a-nook space, we moved my desk to our bedroom, we rearranged books on our bookshelf so it’d look nicer on video calls, and within two hours, we were ready.
She moved in on Monday July 26. The bear bedspread didn’t make it two weeks.
Let me just say, without Holy Spirit empowerment, rooms don’t just get ready in two hours. Hearts don’t just get ready over a weekend.
Ten months have passed. Our Gen Z housemate moved out a few days before Memorial Day. Last weekend, we put everything back. I have my house back. I have my office back. The vacuum is back in its proper spot. The bear bedspread is back. Everything is back.
It’s all back, but at the same time, I know it’s not the same. Because I’ve changed.
Ministry has a knack for doing that. I remember coming back home after working at Indian Hills Camp over the summers as a teenager and while my routine was back to normal, I wasn’t living the same-ol’-same-ol’ life. How I viewed the world changed. How I processed my relationships changed. How I viewed heartache changed. How I viewed selflessness changed. How I cleaned toilets, and for whom I cleaned them, changed. How I viewed my leaders changed. How I viewed God’s love changed. How I wanted to be used by God changed. How I wanted to hear from Him, or my desperation to hear from Him rather, changed.
In the past ten months, I have had to hold fast to Hebrews 13:1-2a, “Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers.”
Hospitality to strangers is easy to neglect. Why? Because it’s sacrificial. It’s inconvenient. It’s picking up extra chores. It’s praying for the tender heart of the Father to be a reality in your heart and expressed in your words. It’s a faith filled risk. It’s an act of obedience to serve King Jesus. It’s singing the lyrics to ‘I Surrender All’ when it’s easy, and then singing them again and again when you’re tired.
And yes, dear reader, it’s heartache.
And yet I’m so very grateful for that heartache. As Dr. Rob Reimer has put it,
“[T]hose seasons shaped me, changed me, and developed me in ways I never could have grown without the pain. But it wouldn’t have happened without persistence…One of the hardest, most important lessons I have learned is not to quit before God releases.”[1]
And so, we enter into this next season, back, but not looking back.
“Brothers, I do not consider myself to have laid hold of it. But I do one thing, forgetting the things behind and straining toward the things ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
Philippians 3:13-14
Back. Changed. Onward.
Dr. Rob Reimer. https://www.instagram.com/p/CeZewFDsnGU/
