Some dear friends of ours live in a very charming 150-year-old farmhouse just down the road from us. I love the historical feel of the place, and the way my artistically gifted friend has decorated it. But when our funny friends describe the realities of living in a house that old, I realize there’s a price to be paid for all that historical charm.
“It’s 52 degrees in my kitchen right now,” my friend will report. Drafty walls make the house feel like the penguin exhibit at the zoo during the winter months.
Until they had their well revamped last year, our friends routinely ran out of water after a couple of showers or loads of laundry—not good in a household of six.
One day the wife called me in a panic and asked if she could race over and rinse her hair. Seems their well ran dry halfway through her home color job and she knew if she didn’t get those chemicals rinsed out pronto, she was probably going to end up looking like a raven-haired hoochie mama.
And then there was the time the husband had to crawl under the charming farmhouse to investigate a water leak. As he was lying there in the claustrophobic crawlspace, his son flushed the toilet up above. It was then our friend discovered that some kind of important cap was missing from the toilet plumbing under the house. The ground upon which he was lying was disturbingly moist, and beside him was what he described as a “toilet paper volcano” and a potty pipe bubbling over like Mt. Vesuvius.
And it wasn’t like he could just dash out of there to escape the nastiness. No, he had to slowly wiggle through it all to get out.
Call me a bad friend, but I’m laughing again as I recall that story.
The latest domestic mishap occurred at the farmhouse just recently, in the wee hours of the night, when a skunk emptied its stink tank on our friends’ front porch, right next to their front door and under a window. The same drafty walls that let heat out also let smells right in, so at o-dark-thirty, our friends were out in 20-degree temperatures searching for the stinky critter and throwing open windows to air out the house.
We had dinner over there that evening and there was enough essence of skunk still wafting through the house to require us to wash our clothes twice when we got home.
After all of this, our good-natured and adventurous friends have sometimes teetered on the brink of regretting their decision to buy their old house. Cute, quaint and charming has often turned into inconvenient, uncomfortable and expensive.
It seems the IDEA of living in an old farmhouse was better than the REALITY.
At the risk of sounding like a jaded pessimist, it seems many things just don’t end up being as good, fulfilling or fun as we think they’ll be.
Thankfully, that’s not true about the heavenly home God is preparing for those who believe in and follow Jesus Christ. In fact, the Bible says heaven will be better than anything we can imagine (1 Corinthians 2:9).
The Apostle John was given a glimpse, and we find his amazing descriptions in the book of Revelation.
Brilliant colors, stunning beauty, no more tears, mourning, crying or pain, and the constant, glorious, loving presence of God.
If you follow Christ, it’s your sure hope.
I don’t know about you, but I need that hope when current events make feel like I’m trapped under a house next to a bubbling-over potty pipe.
“Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me.”—Jesus Christ (as recorded in John 14:1)