There's no place like home.

We recently broke off the toaster oven timer switch. We swapped it with one of the other dials (Drew's genius). Now I turn my dial to "warm" when I want to toast it for 3 minutes.

When little things like this happen, I being to notice everything; like the drawer handles in the living room and kitchen and bedrooms that are missing and need repairing. Our dining room chair beams are beginning to fall off or the one chair whose base is screwed in by only one single screw. We have bright orange extension cords running from one socket across the living room so that our lamps plug in due to the fact we started replacing our nob and tubing. Oh, and actually, two of those lamps don't even work anymore, they are currently just happy little pieces of living room 'sculpture'.

To top it off, this last week I have spent in a contamination chamber of sorts. Our home has been covered in plastic for 10 days now as Drew is finishing up painting our home. He has been sick since Saturday which has sent the process back several days. I, on the other hand, am like a perfectly healthy chipmunk bouncing off the walls inside my plastic shroud, wondering when I will see the light of day again.

With this new found craziness, I have managed to tear apart the inside of our home ("More??!!??" you say - oh yes, I can't help myself). It has seemed like a good idea to reorganize drawers, redo our kitchen hutch, shampoo the rugs and rearrange our living room, among other things. So here I am, upstairs in my muggy plastic-covered sauna, escaping the genius idea at the time to "deep clean" downstairs.

When I get like this, the Spirit convicts me to remember what I do have: a home. Not just a house, but a home, where my family dwells. Where I get to "come home" to a husband and darling girls. I also know that as this earthly home falls apart or breaks or because of my insane need to clean sometimes actually gets torn apart in the process, that God has already prepared an everlasting home for us. A perfect home. A home with all the handles in place. With no need for extension cords to make things work. It is perfect. I am glad the Spirit uses the imperfect here to point me to the perfect there.