Receiving: Our 7th House-iversary
Today is one of my favorite days of the year—our “House-iversary!”
We’ve lived in this 122-year-old house for seven very good years. When it was first built, our house was just down the street from saloons, brothels, and secret tunnels running underground from the more respectable establishments to the aforementioned saloons and brothels. And now it’s just down the street from a coffee shop with the best pastries, a brewery with a rooftop patio, a higher-than-normal amount of tattoo shops and dispensaries, and a lovely boutique clothing store where you can buy a sweater for the low, low price of $150. The secret tunnels are still down the street too, but they tell me the tunnels aren’t structurally sound enough for me to realize my Nancy Drew dreams of walking through one. Maybe someday.
This house has seen a lot of change outside its walls, and this year it saw some changes inside its walls. We knocked out the wall that divided a small living room from a cramped dining room, which has given us more room to breathe (and spread out all our magnatile creations and train tracks all over the floor), and the opportunity to build the most glorious floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, complete with a sliding ladder. We did this primarily with the hope of making more room in our home for family, friends, neighbors—anyone in need of the shelter of a warm welcome and a meal in good company, complete with Hot Wheels cars underfoot.
Yet I could not have known on our last house-iversary how much I would need the goodness of home and Jesus’s presence here among us to be a shelter for me in what has turned out to be a really hard year.
In these seven years in our house, I’ve found so much joy in giving and sharing our family’s life with the people on our street. But this year was marked more by receiving from my neighbors than my capacity to give. When I was caring for my grieving friend in her first days as a widow, neighbors cried with us and then aerated our lawn. When we had construction noise and dust, they bore up under it without complaint—what saints!—and made sure the house key was where it was supposed to be every night. When we were out of town in the heat of summer, they checked on the house, gathered the mail (including a gigantic rug), kept the flowers alive, and cheered on the one tiny tomato growing on our first-ever tomato plant. When our oven broke on December 23, they patiently waited until mid-February for their annual Christmas gingerbread cookies with 1000 sprinkles per inch from the boys, and could not have been more enthusiastic about the kids’ decision to make them in heart and dinosaur shapes instead of trees and stars.
We also got some new neighbors this summer: three families of birds who built nests in the three ferns hanging from our porch. I have a wise and kind friend whose eyes are always toward the Kingdom, and her front door wreath is a magnet for birds’ nests. Each spring some bird makes its home in her wreath, and she puts up a sign telling visitors and delivery people to please respect the birds and go around to the garage. For those months, they don’t open their front door at all. She talks about what a lesson in hospitality it has all been for her. Everything she shares about it is so beautiful and inspiring.
With all that is in me, I wish I could have so gracious a posture toward our own avian guests, made by God and provided for by his hand. However…
I hate those daggum birds. I am terrified of birds at close range (which for me is, like, 30 feet), and the only person I know who is more afraid of birds than I am is Matt. So there’s that.
They burst out of our ferns like a bat from hell every time we open the front door or turn on our porch light. Once, before I realized our new “neighbors” had moved in, I was lifting the fern off its hook to water it, and a bird flew/flailed out of its nest at my actual face. I was traumatized. So now, when I water the ferns every few days, I find a long stick to gently tap at the base of the plant so that the bird can fly off without attacking me. Then I carefully water the fern, making every effort to keep the plant healthy to protect the nest, but not get a drop of water on the nest. Can you believe those stinkin’ birds, making me care about them and feel responsible for them, even though I’m so furious that they make me live in fear of my own front porch?!
One of the birds even had the nerve—the audacity!—to lay eggs in their fern nest. And you know what? I have fretted for weeks about that nest. “Should I water the fern? I mean, what if I get too close and the momma bird won’t come back, and the eggs are abandoned? [Insert tears at the thought of abandoned baby birds.] But if I don’t water the fern, it will die, and then predators will be able to see the nest, and then the eggs are toast, and I’ll also have an ugly dead plant hanging from my porch.” I think hosting these birds has shaved years off my life.
And yet, when I heard the first tiny little bird chirps coming from the nest as I sat sipping my coffee by the front window in the early morning dark, I held my breath, body completely frozen, heart pounding, as I watched the momma bird hover over them and feed them as they stretched toward her. In that moment, I felt relief that I had not accidentally endangered them. And terror, because, well, they are birds. But mostly, I felt something that I desperately needed in a heart-rending season: a sense of wonder and the palpable presence and delight of God.
It seems it’s a year for receiving from all my neighbors, even the avian ones. And as I reflect on life on our street and in this house this year, I know in a new way that while giving of ourselves as Christ has given all of himself is most certainly a sign of his coming Kingdom, that receiving in wonder and humility is as well.