Our family used to live on the ceiling. Upside down, fighting gravity, wondering why everyone else preferred the ground.
Over the past year, God began moving us. Through various happenings we fell, one by one, to the floor. We landed with huge thuds which actually broke our hearts. Being unused to this arrangement, we struggled to stand upright.
Everything looked so strange down here. Especially at first, because the rest of our lives–the furniture and food and personal belongings–were still up on the ceiling. Now those things are slowly falling down to us. And each falling item is another shock, something else we must grow accustomed to.
The chairs, for instance. When one of them first fell, we circled it for days, thinking what a weird place this was to have it, wondering why it did not stay up on the ceiling where it had always been. But eventually we tried sitting in it and realized how cool it is to have a chair down here on the floor, in the true reality of life, where it can be used in the manner intended.
The vase of flowers, too. One day it landed, smack, on the coffee table next to the comfy chair. A little water spilled out, and a few petals broke off. I thought, “Oh dear! Why did something else have to tumble down today?” Yet the more I looked at the flowers, right side up and cheery, the more thankful I became.
This is how God wants us to live. We do not have to be topsey-turvey all the time. We can live in honest, painful, beautiful reality and know that it is good.
Besides, do you have any idea how much easier it is to have people over now that we need not invite them up to ceiling!?
