When Home Feels Out of Whack

Photo by Bernie Almanzar on Unsplash

He couldn’t find a pair of matching socks.

That’s how my friend Josh described the chaos during the throes of his closet-bathroom renovation. That Sunday morning, while we chatted after church, after he had stood in front of 300 people to preach, he confirmed that he had managed to find a matched pair. He hiked up his pant cuffs to prove it.

Josh was commiserating with me because I had mentioned some of my own experience—my wife’s and my move-in to our new-old house, particularly our bathroom re-do, largely for safety reasons. He picked up on the exasperation and unsettledness in my voice. He was trying to say, with a light touch, “I feel your pain.”

I am coming to love our house near Nashville, near our expectant daughter. We are grateful for this new home. But we’ve faced some, um, challenges. I hadn’t quite gone into all the details with Josh: the HVAC that died on a hot June Saturday afternoon (and I was preaching the next morning), the windows that needed replacing (especially one that leaked through the wall below it), the fridge on the fritz that smelled like something fishy inside had died, the dining room furniture from our old house that wouldn’t squeeze into the downsized space.

I had mentioned the disruption in our bathroom and closet areas—gritty dust, torn-out fixtures, repeated delays on deliveries while our handy man redid his work schedule more than once. (He was gentle in spirit about it all, saying with a chuckle, “This is the world of home improvement, Tim!”) And the roof, well, we’ve been lucky so far with no sprung leaks. The huge tree that a storm felled in our backyard missed even grazing it.

Lest I sound only like an entitled and whiny American, I do thank God for shelter. For a neighborhood with friendly folks and graceful trees. A place like this is blessed, writes Doug McKelvey in his apt “Liturgy for Home Repairs.” “The sharing of life within these walls is a gift,” he prays. And we can forget the privilege of being, as Doug puts it, a “caretaker of [God’s] blessings,” of seeing stewarding the place as “an act of loving service to all family, friends, or strangers who will shelter here or enjoy fellowship beneath this roof.” Many are the gifts offered by this space of hospitality and daily life: Having people over for meals, as we did just last night, working in the bedroom I’ve turned into my study and writing refuge.

But I won’t pretend that the stressors have no impact. They do: the tension of fixtures that get delivered damaged, the gouged, ripped look of our walls, the toilet yanked from its resting place and stowed in the shower stall while a bathroom vanity gets installed and a floor re-laid. There is a sense of disorientation some days. I see again how the stability of place matters. “When your home is out of whack,” as my wife puts it, “it feels like chaos.” For this is more than just a place, but a setting that envelopes our life and work and play and rest. I know better now how we long for the security of immovable sheltering walls.

I’m not alone in seeing some larger lessons. Even some ways to pray. In inhabiting a home you learn what the sometimes urgent demands of maintenance quickly teach you, writes Blake Nail at mbird.com, “how little control you truly have. … Living in a home will quickly humble you, especially if you’re not particularly handy.”

That humility makes me even more anxious to find a deeper source of normalcy. More determined to seek spiritual securities. The Son of Man, as Jesus said, had no where to lay his head (sharing the fate of the world’s unhoused and displaced).

I love how Psalm 90 stresses that the Lord has “been our dwelling place in all generations.” How “before the mountains were brought forth, [O God,] or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.”

It is here where I am seeing a longer view. And one that’s strangely, counterintuitively reassuring.

Some day my angst at my more or less minor domestic disruptions will matter even less. A little irritability is understandable, but not full-blown anxiety. From a cosmic point of view, other matters matter more than the four walls of my dwelling. So I will try to be patient with schedulers boggling yet another estimated delivery date. I’ll worry a little less about insisting that everything is “just so” in a dresser drawer or room. I’ll take encouragement from Josh’s playful take on scattered socks. I’d like to remember the more important work of living and sleeping and opening the doors of my house to others. And with God’s help, I’ll try to live trustingly in God’s sheltering presence.