Shoes In The Back Hall

We have a back hall in our home.  A space between our family room and our garage.  We use this space more than we do our front door.  Each day we travel "to" and "from" using this space.  It is a transient space.  A space created to usher from one place to the next.  This space is also small; so narrow that if the backdoor and closet door are both open one cannot pass through.

This transient space often becomes a bottleneck for us.  Coming home with arms full of groceries: crowded space.  3 school kids trying to get out the door with backpacks, instruments, and lunches in tow: crowded space. 

Yesterday when I came home (through the usual, narrow, crowded passage-way) I was held up by my kids' shoes scattered and clogging up the hallway (I had difficulty getting the door all the way open because of their shoes).  My initial reaction was to holler (out of frustration) at the kids to come clean up their shoes and "put them away properly" (like I've told them so many times before!).  Yet I held on for a moment.  No hollering came.  Instead I was graced by something else: vision to see what I usually miss.

In that moment I heard God remind me, "There will be a day, not too far off, when you will long to trip over your kids' shoes."

In that moment I found myself pausing.  Stopping and really seeing what is.

That was the "long, loving look" that Walter Burghardt talks about.  The privilege to see scattered shoes as more than a nuisance, inconvenience, and obstacle to my final arrival home.  I was reminded of the joy my kids bring me, reminded of all the places their shoes take them, and reminded of how small their feet were when they were born.

I was reminded that cumbersome spaces of transition are often a gift.

May you be given the capacity to look deeply into the cluttered, disorganized, confining, transition of life; that you might be overwhelmed with the truth that even there, you are home.