Rearranging
I grew up in a home with tiny rooms with tiny doors (where I routinely smacked my forehead) in the company of a (tiny) mother who loves to rearrange furniture. Every couple of months, my mom would rearrange our furniture with Tetris like precision, blatantly ignoring the fact that it shouldn’t be physically possible for our furniture to fit in those rooms in so many different ways. She hasn’t out grown the tendency.
These days she maintains that she rearranges her furniture in order to make sure that everything gets cleaned underneath. I have no clue if that’s true, but I do know that the furniture rearranging appears to be genetic. Early on in our marriage, my husband tried (unsuccessfully) to get me to promise that I’d stop rearranging the furniture while he was at work. It was disorienting to him when he came home after dark and tripped over furniture that had been in an entirely different place when he’d left that morning.
These days I do seasonal furniture shifting. And sometimes things move around in our house more often than that. This weekend, I moved around all the plants in our house. Last month, while still fighting my way through Long Covid, I thought it would be a great idea to move a desk into Littles’ room and an oversized arm chair out of Tiny and Bruiser’s. Needless to say, that was all I did that day. The Man always graciously offers to help me with my furniture shifting, but whenever I get the itch to move furniture, I want to move it immediately…and waiting for my husband doesn’t sound terribly appealing when I can manhandle the furniture myself (and enlist unsuspecting children who realize it’s more fun to help Mom move couches than it is to do math).
This latest rearranging had me trying to figure out what the appeal is for me. I’m definitely not doing it to clean the house more effectively. (My mother is 5 times the house keeper I am.) But what I realized is that rearranging the furniture changes the way that I see the house. Plants that looked drab suddenly catch the light. Furniture the kids had mauled looks fresh again. Rooms I’d grown used to are suddenly capable of being enjoyed again.
Rearranging my furniture helps me see the house differently, and because of that, it helps me to love what I already have again. Even when there are dents and scratches and stains on everything we own.
I was thinking about this as I walked around the neighborhood this morning. The trees are pushing out their first tender spring leaves, and I realized that God does us the grace of redecorating the world for us, which helps us to see the world He’s given us with fresh eyes. He helps us to enjoy what He created—again. He helps us to love what we’ve been given and where we’ve been placed.
In the autumn, he puts colored leaves on the trees (and on the ground). He allows frost to tip the grass in the winter and snow to crown our mountains. He gives us beautiful blooms in the spring and brilliant blue skies in the summer. A rearranged world to open our eyes and our hearts. And I’m assuming He does it with far less effort than I got that armchair through the doorway last month...and doesn’t mess up the paint job in the process.
So here’s our challenge for the week: what’s one thing we can move (even if it’s just a tiny tchotchke, a limp cactus, or a seasonal hand towel) that might enable us to see our spaces with fresh eyes? And what’s one thing we can pause to notice that God is changing in the outdoor world to heighten our wonder at His creativity and beauty?
