when the past becomes wishful thinking.

I finally had that conversation with God. The one I should have had six years ago. “God,” I said, “I miss my house. The holidays are approaching once again, and the time for dinner parties and church fellowship gatherings. Yet, now I don’t have a place to host. Even a simple dinner with my sister, children, and grandchildren. I can’t do it here in this basement. I have gone from being the hostess to being a guest, because I don’t have enough chairs or a big enough table, or a comfortable kitchen. All my hosting equipment, stuck in a closet. While I don’t grace myself for being the best hostess, I do like to host, and when I do, I make the best of it and enjoy it to the max.

    I don’t have a house anymore. I live in a basement below my daughter’s house. I miss the house I had in Miami, and later the one in Texas. They were not big or luxurious, but they were mine; they were all mine.

    As I look back at my mother’s last four years of her life, stuck in a nursing home for health reasons, I remember how she longed to go back home, even when she knew deep down that it was not going to happen. She had finally realized that her dream of having her home the way she wanted it was now just that, a dream. Illness had confined her. The day she left, she feared she would never come back. I also think of my sister, who still lives in the house she built, yet is not so happy. Fraile and weak, she lacks the strength to even clean it. She is not so proud anymore of her pride and joy. It makes me sad, for many reasons, and ashamed.

    I don’t have my house as I used to, either. And as I ponder on this, I hear God’s voice speaking to me. I don’t have my pretty little house anymore. But I have a home. I look around me and the life I share with my family, and I can’t be anything but content. My heart is filled. I am healthy to pursue ministry and life.

    It's Thanksgiving today, and as mundane as it may sound to some, my prayer, the Word, and the conviction that God gave me, is that it is useless for me to ponder on the past because it will never come back. It needs to be buried in the past, where it belongs, and I should not dwell on something that is no more. Rather, God wants my focus to be on the future, on the next chapter. Enjoy my basement. Embrace the next stage. Prepare to reap the fruit of my labor. “I have so many better things prepared for you than a couple of brick-and-mortar structures. #getittogethergirl. I am your home.”

The end of the matter is better than its beginning, and patience is better than pride…Consider the work God has done: Who can straighten what He has made crooked? When times are good, be happy, but when times are bad, consider God has made the one as well as the other.” (Ecclesiastes 7:9,13-14).

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