“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” Deuteronomy 6:5-9 (NIV)
After living in the same house and the same neighborhood for more than thirty years, someone finally began to build on an empty lot two doors up from my home. When construction began last spring, Sunday afternoons became the prime time to go and have a look around the site. As the ground was cleared, the site prepared, and the foundation poured it was exciting to imagine what the new house would look like and to reflect on my own experience when we built our home 34 years before. As the house was being framed it was fun to imagine where the rooms would be. A common practice of all contractors is to write little notes on the studs and plywood which are later covered up with sheetrock and flooring. One Sunday afternoon as I was touring the house, my attention was caught by lengthy writing on the 2”x4”s running horizontally around the top of a room. As I began to look around, I noticed this type of writing was everywhere on any 2”x4” running around the top of the rooms. On closer inspection, I realized that it was all scripture! The whole inside frame of the house was covered in scripture! They had truly written the words of God on the doorframes of their new home. I marveled at how wonderful and powerful this was and what a blessing to the family that would soon live here; they would always be covered with God’s words. Regretfully, I wished that we had done the same when we built our home many years earlier. We cannot go back and take our house down to the studs, but God’s commandments can be upon my heart. I can write God’s words on the doorposts of my heart, and I can know that God holds me in His hands and covers me with His blessings.
© 2012 Mary M. Berryman. All rights reserved.