An old house and thoughts on friendship

More thoughts from Niequist's book, Cold Tangerines. Its chock full of goodness, I tell ya.


"...I thought of myself as an old-house-person, a person who appreciates character over perfection, who likes the bumps and bruises of an old home...

And then I went over to a friend's house - a new house. I was overcome with jealousy over her new house, not because it was fancy or big, but because the toilets didn't run and none of the windows were painted shut, and none of the doorknobs get stuck... 

I was so jealous of my friend's new house that when I got back to my house, all I could see were the imperfections, the fixer-upper things that were not yet fixed up...

I want to be all shiny and new, all put together, and I just can't get there. The things I try to forget don't go away, and the mistakes I've made don't go away, and I'm a lot like my old house, cracked and mismatched and patched over. 

On my worst days, I start to believe that what God wants is perfection. That God is a new-house God. That everything has to work just right, with no cracks in the plaster and no loose tiles. That I need to be completely fixed up. I always think that God's kind of people are squeaky-clean people whose garages don't leak, but really a lot of the people God uses to do amazing things are people who don't necessarily have it all together. A lot of the best stories in the Bible, the ones where God does sacred, magical things through people, have a cast of characters with kind of shady pasts, some serious fixer-uppers.

On my very best days, as an act of solidarity with my house, since we're both kind of odd, mismatched, screwed-up things, I practice letting it be an old not-fixed-up house, while I practice being a not-fixed-up person. I wear my ugly pants, the saggy yellow terry-cloth ones with the permanently dirty hems, and I walk around my house, looking at all the things that I should fix someday, but I don't fix them just yet, and I imagine God noticing all the things about me that should get fixed up one day, and loving me anyway and being okay with the mess for the time being...

In my best moments, when I calm down and listen closely, God says 'I didn't ask you to become new and improved today. That wasn't the goal. You were broken down and strange yesterday, and you still are today, and the only one freaked out about it is you. 
I sometimes hate this house for not being what I want is to be, and I sometimes hate myself for not being that either. But little by little, my funny old broken down house is teaching me that good enough is good enough. Maybe in six months we'll take the home-improvement next step, whatever that might be, and maybe we won't, but my house will keep me warm and dry until then, and I'll try to be kind and gentle to my house and to myself in the meantime."


On friendship
"...Friendship is acting out God's love for people in tangible ways. We were made to represent the love of God in each other's lives, so that each person we walk through life with has a more profound sense of God's love for them. Friendship is an opportunity to act on God's behalf in the lives of the people that we're close to, reminding each other who God is. When we do the hard, intimate work of friendship, we bring a little more of the divine into daily life. We get to remind one another about the bigger, more beautiful picture that we can't always see from where we are. 

True friendship is a sacred, important thing, and it happens when we drop down into that deeper level of who we are, when we cross over into the broken, fragile parts of ourselves. We have to give something up in order to get friendship like that. We have to give up our need to be perceived as perfect. We have to give up our ability to control what people think of us. We have to overcome the fear that when they see the depths of who we are, they'll leave. But what we give up is nothing in comparison to what this kind of friendship gives to us. Friendship is about risk. Love is about risk. If we can control it and manage it and manufacture it, then its something else, but if it's really love, really friendship, it's a little scary around the edges."