This Ole House

"Are the kids sad when you go over to your old house?" I asked my son Jamie. He had said he took Maddie and Anne-Marie with him when he goes over to do touch-up and minor repairs in readying the house for sale.

"No, they don't say anything," he replied. "They like our new house."

I admitted that it made me sad when I thought of the nursery left behind that he had painted with wall murals of gamboling lambs being led by the Good Shepherd with hand-lettered verses of the 23rd Psalm bordering the ceiling.

But when I reflected on our conversation, I could understand why the children were unaffected. Without the throbbing, pulsing life of their family living in it, the house was just an empty shell, just as the body of a departed one is merely the shell that contained the soul and spirit of the one living there.

A few days later, our son Mark and his wife Rhonda took us for a wonderful evening of sightseeing and dining at the Oasis, a restaurant built clinging to the side of a mountain where we ate on one of the balconies with a view of Lake Travis below. The umbrellas positioned over the tables in bright, Mexican colors shielded diners from the western sun. But when it dropped low on the horizon, waiters collapsed our shade for an unimpeded view of Old Sol sliding into a mountain valley and sinking as if into the lake.

It was the fete accompli of the day, drawing applause and even a "Yay, God!" once. It was riveting to visually detect the sun moving by degrees until the last curve of the orange orb was blotted out by the infinitesimal turning of the earth.

The gorgeous sunset, which drew camera-laden guests into a clump on a landing for an attempt at winning a photographic prize (the best sunset shot was exhibited in a showroom inside), was beginning to lose its fire. When I next looked, the sky was a colorless grey, streaked with strata of dark clouds. The light had gone out, like the color draining from a face when the light of the soul is gone.

The Bible calls our body a tabernacle, or a tent, a temporary dwelling. "For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, and house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens," II Corinthians 5:1. Verse 6 says, "...whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord." And verse 8, "...we are...willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord." We will never have to move from that house!