mercy seat home...

I am a homemaker... a home maker. Some of my most treasured compliments come from people who visit us for the first time and say “This feels like home. Can I come again?” Slipcovers can be washed and the painted coffee table does not need coasters. Under the coffee table are books and games. The two most important games are Chinese Checkers and the Trouble game. Our children played Trouble with their grandma and our grandchildren play Trouble with us. When they are old enough, I will teach them Chinese Checkers just as my grandma taught me. The wood floor can be mopped and the rugs are inexpensive rag and shag. The front door squeaks and the wooden walls like me, not quite perfect. It is a little cluttered with treasures from the past and the furniture all has a story. Our families are remembered in many of the items our rolling stone lives have collected... the huge grain scythe and cradle that Daddy began using as a twelve year old boy hangs in our great room, the blacksmith anvil from Michael’s blacksmith granddaddy sits on our hearth, the friendship quilt created by his grandmother’s girlfriends for her wedding hangs over the dining table, my great-grandfather’s brass fireplace fender sits in front of the fireplace, my grandma’s cut crystal bowl sparkles in the light in the kitchen glass cabinet. And our treasures... the first furniture we bought, an old round table and chairs, sits in the dining room... the old bank clock with Westminster chimes still sings the hours and quarter hours thirty nine years after we bought it... the old upright piano that I had as a child... these tell some of our story of home.
This past week I have been clearing out winter and ushering in spring to our home. I folded all the wool comforters and stored them. Cotton coverlets now wait to be used on the sofa and chairs. Candles have been relocated and renewed. The color yellow, the color of sunshine and butter (two of my favorite things) pops up all around the room in pillows, flowers and flower pots, lemons in bowls. The slipcovers have been changed and some of the rugs removed. Barefoot time is coming and cool wooden floors feel so good to my feet. Soon we will remove the glass panels from the back porch and put in the screens. Windows will be open even though our furnace man cringes at the thought of the humidity and pollen that will come in. It is the only way we can hear the bird song in the morning and smell the crab apple blossoms in the spring. I need to hear and smell and see and taste and touch spring in as many ways as I can. I know how to gather home together, how to gather those who need home, how to make home for my heart and for the hearts of others.
The old hymns we sang...The Home Over There, I Will Sing You a Song... told of faraway homes for the soul. One old hymn, From Every Stormy Wind, has two verses that are my vision of home here on earth. “ From every stormy wind that blows, from every swelling tide of woes, There is a calm, a sure retreat; ‘Tis found beneath the mercy seat. There is a place where spirits blend, where friend holds fellowship with friend, Tho’ sundered far, by faith they meet around one common mercy seat.”
In Exodus 22 I read the description of the mercy seat on the top of the Ark. It was beautiful. Gold cherubim surrounded the mercy seat on the ark of the testimony where God would come to meet with the people. Theologically it was also a place of atonement ( at-one-ness because of recognition and repentance) as well as a place of communion between God and priest. You were safe while God was in the mercy seat. All was known, all was forgiven, all was well. A mercy seat, a place of grace, a place and space in time where one can meet God, meet one’s friends and family, home, sweet home... I am a home maker. I am a mercy seat... a place where God can come rest, speak to me and I can rest and speak to him.