Clothesline Grace: Devotion 393

She snuggles up close. Beyond work, beyond play, beyond words said and thoughts thought; I am convinced these moments are the most sacred of the day.

These in the quiet dark when we say our “I love you’s,” and we whisper our prayers and we read our books, we lay quiet.

It is a feast for me. The moments I have hungered for all day come ravishing in; the moments when my boys and girls tell me anything and everything that is on their minds. They ask questions about tomorrow, and relive today and hope for things far away. Then the lights go dim and my youngest gets so close there isn’t even air between us.

She speaks in a low hush. I can tell this is important; she is never quiet and rarely serious. She asks why I don’t live with my daddy anymore.

I can’t quite figure out where this question came from. I explain how her daddy and I met and how we fell in love and how my daddy was happy and overjoyed when we started a family. I was selling but she wasn’t buying. I wondered if this had to do with her China home, she remembers that one too.

She whispered even more quieter now, “Is it okay if I never leave you?”

She had seen something she didn’t like. It wasn’t a Grandpa who lives alone, and it wasn’t a little girl, now a wife and mama that left her daddy.

No, it was a parade of workmen that she had seen stroll through our home. At six-years old she had taken that parade and created a story of her own. A story that we were moving and things would change and her life would be suddenly different and scary.

I pulled her in and whispered back her whispers. “We are painting and repairing. That’s all." I said and continued "No packing, no moving, no changes that we all wouldn’t face together."

I assured her if she chose to, she could live with me forever. I continued to explain that one day she might want a house and a husband and little babies that call her mama. She decided we would be neighbors and every night I would come read to her and her husband. I told her how much I loved every thought of that and she drifted off to sleep.

There is something about our homes that is so precious. I am convinced when God sketched our souls into existence he covered them with a physical body such that we would know shelter, a place to call home.

What other possible reason than to give us a foretaste of heaven?

We dream and build and go into debt to call four walls our home. Then we spend our lives decorating and repainting and refurnishing hoping to happy this home.

Likewise the shelter for our soul. We exercise and eat right and stand on scales hoping this shelter is lighter or better or stronger or prettier. We are rarely contented and only sometimes happy. Not because of finances or failure, but because we forget these places we call home are for a moment when our souls are built for forever.

My daughter wants forever. Children get that, but we age and grow wise and forget that forever is exactly the desire He placed in our souls.

I make decisions and forget forever. I set priorities that dismiss eternal. I say prayers for the present, and souls are missed because I neglected to pray for them and their tomorrow.

Something doesn’t feel quite right so we go on a diet, or buy a new can of paint. The hunger we feel, the longing we sense goes deep. God gifts us with a heavenly aching.

It’s the daddy reminding their child, “You left this home for a while, to start a family, or start a business or make a name, but it’s me you’re missing.”

You hear the whispers late in the night, “Fill your home with Me, and the aching won’t be so bad, fill your hearts and minds and lives with redemption and grace and glory and you will be filled.”

Then when the end comes and you move once more, you will find a door suddenly open. It’s the one you have searched for your whole life, the home you have hungered for in every moment, and the sweet peace you have pined for.

And there, it is there in that forever, we get to hear the stories we have hoped for by the Father who wrote them and the Son who lived them.