People must live somewhere. Most live in houses. Most of those houses have walls. Most of those walls need to look good. So I have a job. Yes, I am your friendly, neighborhood drywall guy. I go to work. I sand. I spray. I wonder if we are in a recession. Just another day at the office.

The joy is when I come home, which is why I leave for work. Take tonight for example. While I try to type with one hand around Nathan, who is standing on my lap (at nine weeks), Natalie is giggling almost uncontrollably due to something Patrick MacManus wrote in The Bear In The Attic. We are working at some freezer-burned vanilla icecream, garnished with chocolate chips, while I consider whether or not this would go well with what remains of dinner’s Merlot.

Speaking of dinner, it was fantastic. Natalie put mushrooms on my side of the pizza.  (Guys, give your wives earrings, good things happen.) Life’s sweetest pleasures sometimes come in a bunch of small parcels.

It all started with a cup of coffee with her dad. That was a year and seven months ago. Who knew what all would come of it.  In the last twelve months Natalie and I have experienced: our first kiss, a car accident, home remodeling, financial ups and downs, livestock successes and failures, lots of good wine, food shared with good friends, and the birth of our first son. It has been a good year, and I look forward to many, many more.

I was drifting precariously between wakefulness and sleep. The dark tugged at my eyelids heavily. Thump. “Did you hear that?” I asked. Natalie knows the strange house sounds better than I do. “Do you know what it was?” She didn’t. She did have concerning theories about windows opening. They made me wish I was still asleep. Sleep… Yes… No… Yes… We had been what seemed like hours getting Nathan to sleep. It was my turn. I tried to listen for more sounds. Any hints that I should really be concerned. Not that it makes a difference, I would have to go check things out. But I should wake up first.
The sound of glass breaking is very singular and unique. It is instant and sharp, and yet it lingers on the air. In my groggy state I couldn’t decipher exactly where the shatter happened, but there was no question what it was, glass. Pane glass. The transition from mostly asleep to adrenaline pumped and ready to tear the arms off of whatever it was I was sure was going to come through the bedroom door was instant. It was faster than instant. I shouted, no, bellowed, hoping through some instinct to scare the demon-driven monster away. The dog, outside was barking frantically. His deep, protective bark. I scramble through my drawer for the gun. It wasn’t there. But Natalie assures me it is. She turns on the light, I find the gun, and my AAA powered LED penlight. It was about as likely to penetrate the dark as a pocket knife is to conquer the Amazonian jungle.  But I delved in undaunted. I had no choice.

There is something about having others to protect that makes you brave. I made my way from room to room checking the doors and windows. Down the stairs. I was breathing hard. No glass anywhere. The dog was still barking like mad. Maybe I missed something upstairs. My family was still upstairs. I scrambled up the stairs.

Walmart sells these rolls of padded double-sided sticky-tape. You use them to attach things to the wall. Things like mirror tiles. Said mirror tiles look particularly attractive when placed appropriately in small spaces, like our upstairs bath. I didn’t notice a warranty of any type on the packaging when I bought the tape, but I kind of expected it to last a while. But, failing that, I was left with one question. Why, out of 1440 minutes in a day, did it have to fail in the middle of the night?

The blue light of my LED flashlight cast eerie reflections on the bathroom wall off of the hundreds of glass-mirror shards on the tile floor. On the wall, one of the middle mirror-tiles was missing, leaving a gap. The relief washed over me slowly, though my heart was still pumping. The dog continued lapping around the house bellowing.  Natalie came up. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. I hugged her. We both had the same thought at the same time. All the noise, the glass breaking, the yelling, the shuffling and thumping, surely Nathan would have woken, after all the time trying to get him asleep. We looked in the bedroom, and there he lay, sleeping peacefully, as if he knew everything was alright the whole time.

(I originally wrote this post last month, before Nathan was born. I seem to have saved it wrong, and never posted it.)

I can’t help but think that our world, in its full scale fleshly materialism, is in the clutches of gnosticism. The whole world is obsessed with bodies. We want six pack abs, bulging biceps, and fuller busts. We associate beauty with a robotic, utilitarian, youthful type of body. You know, buns of steel. When we are forty-five, we regret that we no longer look twenty. Some still try. The body has a tendency to mature, and that involves stretching, bulging, and sagging. That is the reality of it. But we are obsessed with perfect bodies. Ones that are tight, hard, and don’t wear out. That’s not reality, it gnostic. It denies the fundamental physical reality of being a physical being in a fallen world.

This gnostic view of the body denies life. It is a view that says the primary purpose of the body is to give life to itself. But we know that to live we must lay aside our own life. This is easy for me to say as a guy. I don’t see the effects of this as quickly. Laying aside my life physically may actually make me look stronger, tighter, and all of that. When I work, because I do work, my body for a time will improve. But what about my wife? What happens when she embraces the purpose of the body God has given her, and lays aside her life to give life? For starters, she gives life. Life grows inside of her. And then she starts to grow and change, and the world looks at her and says, ‘eww’. She is uncomfortable often, and by accepting pregnancy she has accepted changes in her body that may never go away. Many in the world, and in the church, look at that kind of sacrifice and cannot fathom why she would do such a thing. It is because only by laying down our lives can we live, and she will not only live, but will have given life to another.

But it is not that she has accepted the idea of looking ugly to give life. Far from it! She has accepted a different idea of beauty. Hers is a more mature beauty. It is a beauty that in twenty years will not look like a girl’s, but will look like the beauty of a woman who has given life to the covenant children of God. We will both one day be old and wrinkly. I hope we can look back through the years not regretting that we have lost our youth, but rejoicing that we have given it. I hope that we will look at the past not as somewhere we wish we could be still, but as somewhere that was a step to where we are going. Where we are going is a real world of real redeemed bodies. Mature ones that are more beautiful than any we can imagine here.

Nathan Laurence arrived at 2:38 Sunday morning. He was 8 lbs. 3 oz. and 21 inches long. Mother and son and recovering and doing well.

St. Augustine deals very interestingly with time in his Confessions. The past doesn’t exist, neither does the future, but the present does. But what is the present but a transfer of the future to the past. So there must be a present of the past, and present of the present, and present of the future. Regardless, we live in time, as God has seen fit to create a world that proceeds from one end to the other. In that time we have cycles of time. Minutes become hours, hours days, days weeks, weeks months, months years, and years one after another. This year, which is proceeding last, causes me to look back and remember the last, which has been significant. A year ago marks when she said yes. She promised to be joined to me, in flesh and mind. She is now my wife, and a wonderful wife at that. She finishes me, helps me, and adds to me. She is bearing the sign of God’s blessing to me. She is Natalie, my wife, and I love her.