If these walls could speak

In August of this past year, we closed on a home in Richardson, Texas just a few miles from where we live now.  Over the past handful of months, we have drawn plans for our new home and cut through the red tape required to make a project like this happen.  To celebrate the next step - tearing down the existing house - we brought our kids and our friends together for a morning of graffiti art.

Watching the kids cover that old house with graffiti, I felt deep contemplation about the house I am leaving behind -  a home where a great chapter of my life began. I will never forget building the fence with Josh while six months pregnant with Stella or pulling in the back driveway bringing Stella home from the hospital - ushering in a love which you hear about but cannot understand until you are holding your newborn child.  The door has revolved over and over and brought in people and moments I hold dear to my heart.

During this season when your babies are being born, you really live in your home.  The first nice couch you bought is transformed into a changing table.  Your kitchen table in turn becomes your new desk.  And when you can finally afford to buy a desk, the kids are old enough to color and your desk becomes an arts and crafts station.  The kitchen island is part library, part cafeteria, part cubicle.  Every surface is covered: school and sports portraits I have no idea what to do with, sippy cups with magically disappearing parts, books I swear someday I will have the time to read and colors, paints, crayons, play dough, markers and construction paper make the whole place feel like a giant canvas.  Every moment bares the tension between "I love this" and "I'm completely losing my mind."

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But seeing the little artists bring these blank walls to life helped me remember I am in a season...one of those where they say the days are long but the years are short.  Someday I will miss this beautiful mess.  And then, watching this new home, go from full and teaming with life to empty and being rummaged for parts, pointed me again towards tomorrow.  I see the walls come down and also my future built up. If these walls could speak, and it seems they already are, they would say,

"I know the plans I have for you.  Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."

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