This is a guest post by my good friend Johanna Fenton. Happy New Year to all!
The house which we just moved into was advertised as a “starter” home. I felt slightly offended, because we had fallen in love with the place but by no means would it be a “starter” home for us. We hope it’s a “finisher” home, meaning, we hope to stay here a really long time.
There are several different ways of counting how many times one moves. There are different measurements … like, do you count the time we moved to Dallas for 3 months? Or do you only measure the major moves … entire household in all?
By different counts we’ve moved upwards to 16 times down to 7 times, depending on how you define a “move.” That’s in the last 10 years.
And I realized for the first time that Jesus never upgraded from the time he was born in a manger in a the little town of Bethlehem. A song I like by Rich Mullins goes:
Birds have nests / Foxes have dens / But the hope of the whole world rests on the shoulders of a homeless man
Jesus had a starter home – a manger. And he had a finisher home – at home with his Father God.
Anyway, I’d like to say that a lot has happened in 16 or 7 moves. I’ve gone from “moving up” to “moving down,” far enough to fall in love with the quirky, dated elements of our “new” “starter” home. Here are a few … these are different shelf papers in our kitchen cabinets. Plus, you’ll see some lovely wallpaper. 🙂
It’s the shiny bits of life that catch you.
The geese, the bricks, the Friendship wallpaper… they all remind me of my childhood.
My current house is the biggest I will ever own. Eventually I’ll move to something smaller. Its downstairs bath has gaudy flowered wallpaper that everyone loves. I’ll probably paint over it eventually but it’ll be the last room painted.