How to Make Any Place Happy

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nd after 11 years here, we paint the walls white, all the walls white, right over the shades
of softest green, because in the beginning I wanted a cocoon and now I just want clean, the quiet of clean.

Because if you’re saying the average nowadays family has two kids?

And we have three times the average with these ridiculous six—  then you multiply the age of these walls that try to contain all their banging, multiply that by three, then these walls are really 33 years old.

And four of these six kids are of the testosterone kind, real live farm boys — so it really was time to open a can of paint.

We start in the dining room.

Which used to be the study, before I moved the table in there and put the books up high, so we just keep calling it the study, where we put out the plates and where we eat books whole. We never get up from the meal without opening the Bible.

First, we patch in the holes with mud. Then sand it and the years right smooth.
We dip brushes and roll it out thick, as if we could cover things, and I remember how round Levi’s milky cheeks were when I first painted these virgin walls one night under a full moon more than a decade ago and he’d sucked his thumb to sleep.

After the walls are washed as white as wool, and before we move the table back in, the littlest, who wasn’t even here in the beginning, she washes away the dust off the century old floors. I call her Cinderella and she laughs loud and loveliest in all the emptiness and it echoes. And she makes them gleam, those floors that we pulled up from the old house and laid down again, the way one farm wife needs to walk the old paths, the ones worn by all the women before her.

That’s the thing: I am going about these floors and this world and this day looking for grace hours. Even moments will do. This changes a lot of things, most things — what you look for. Beauty’s to be had anywhere because where isn’t glory-packed full of God? The art of life is learning how to turn and see a certain way.

I take most things out of the room, leave empty spaces of white, and I hang only two things.
The framed print of the bowed man over the loaf of bread, what I chose when my father-in-law asked me to choose just one thing from the house after Mom Voskamp went Home and he moved away. The print hung over the Farmer’s table all his growing up years, all those nine kids smelling like straw and dairy cows and grace, and now over our six farm kids here and another generation clinging to mercy.
On the other wall, I hang just one word, what every mother needs by the time she gets to a chair: Pray.

For all the piling, layering talk of how to peel back a bit of the earth and find happiness, it is right there on the holy-thin King James pages, right there on the white:
Happy is the people whose God is the Lord. {Ps. 144:15}

Everything else can be taken out of the room and the life — and He is the everything that makes happy.

In the white space, it’s a bit of a life epiphany — Any place becomes more like a palace just by filling it with thoughts of God.

And the Farmer, he grins at me already wiping fingerprints off white walls.

All this grace that makes light.

 http://www.aholyexperience.com/2012/10/how-to-make-any-place-happy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HolyExperience+%28Holy+Experience%29