Houses are structurally designed to shrink. When we moved into our house four years
ago, we had plenty of empty space after we arranged our furniture. I said, "Ugh! What
a strange decorating scheme!"
We had moved out of a very cramped house.
"Don't worry," my husband, Ralph, assured me, his voice echoing off vacant
walls. ''We'll get used to it. Hey, there's room in here to put up a basketball hoop and
sponsor a neighborhood team."
However, houses being the way they are, the opportunity to hold basketball games soon
slipped away. The floor space has diminished by approximately 32.4 cubic feet every six
months.
"Ralph, we need new bookshelves to hold all the books we intend to read someday,''
I said recently.
"Where are we going to put it?" he asked, eager to see God perform a miracle.
I pulled out the tape measure and micrometer and surveyed our living room, moving from
sofa to stereo cabinet to end table to recliner chair to doorway to bird cage to larger
bird cage to even larger bird cage to television to potted tree to window to even larger
potted tree to phone table to the sofa I'd started at and collapsed.
"There's no place to add another piece of furniture," Ralph said astutely.
"Wait," I replied. "I'll figure out something."
So he waited with that look on his face that means it's too bad I'd been exposed to
brain-numbing cartoons for the past decade of child-rearing.
"I've got it!" I exclaimed. "There's lots of empty space
here!"
"Where?" His expression deepened to pity.
"There! In the middle! We can hang the bookshelves from the ceiling!"
In the end, we decided to buy our son a desk for his room, move his book
shelves to our bedroom by moving an armchair to where an end table had been collecting
piles of magazines, and retiring the end table to the attic, where approximately 32.4
cubic feet of empty space disappeared.
I keep telling myself, "Self, there's got to be an end to this house-shrinking. We
can't keep adding stuff to the point that we're forced to move to a larger abode."
"But," my self answers back, "everything we add is well thought out and absolutely
necessary."
Just like my life. It's crammed full of things to get done and there's not enough time
to do it all, yet each activity is absolutely necessary. This is how God gets
crammed out of my life. Who has enough time to pray very long or read the Bible daily or
get to Mass more than once a week? For many of us, joining a committee at church or
volunteering at an agency that helps the needy is virtually out of the question. The
little we give had better be enough because we're already wearing ourselves out trying to
get done the absolutely necessaries.
Cramming our lives thusly full of activities, our relationship with God keeps
shrinking. And then we wonder why He seems so distant.
So I'm going to do something about this problem. I'm going stop doing housework.
Ralph's giving me that look again.
