Lessons from a Chicken Coop Door

Last night I was putting my six year old to bed and suddenly he jumped up on the desk beside the door, monkeyed his way to the door frame where a chin-up/pull-up bar is located and proceeded to do 5 full out chin ups.  My jaw was on the floor.  Have you ever tried to do even one chin up?  I said, "Wow!  You are going to be strong!"  Correction.  This is what he said to that, "No, Mom.  I am strong."  Yup.  He is.  I told my older 17 year old saw what I had just seen.  He said, "He does those every night!"  I had seen him do them before, but I didn't realize he was on a workout regime!!!!  That's the power of observation....he watches my older boys do them all the time and he just figured, he's supposed to as well!  I just wonder how many other 6 year old boys are on a Mr. Universe workout plan.   My older boys will do push-ups with a toddler on their back just to make it harder.  My 6 year old will put his 4 year old brother on his back!  The ratio seems a little more challenging!!!!  So, yes, either Mr. Universe or the Olympics we figure.....

I had another great free decorating day yesterday.  If you had walked in to my house in the middle of the day and seen my hay covered "antiques" in my kitchen earlier on, you might have been a little skeptical.....even I was!  I was determined though.  I had been waiting and waiting for the drywall to be finished, mudded, painted, etc....in the family room, but with two full-time jobs, essentially, my poor husband is a little strapped for time!  So I asked him, "Are you sure I can't put some things on the wall?!"  He kept telling me not to as I would just have to take them all down again, but this week he caved.  "Why not?" he said.  "We can just take them down and put them back up later."  Yeah!

So yesterday, off I went to the barn again.  I had had an idea brewing in my mind for a while.  I didn't know if it would work, but I wanted to give it a try.  I grabbed a few old window frames, some even still had broken glass in them and I also picked up a "chicken coop" door, with rat hole bites in it and everything!

I brought them in where they stood all morning, dropping hay all over the place.  After school, I took them into the family room, cleaned them up and proceeded to hang them on the walls.  I loved how it turned out!  Again, this is where a good blogger inserts a picture.  I promise one day I will do that!

We hung Christmas lights along the perimeter of the whole room along the ceiling and it makes the room really cozy,  I went back outside and grabbed more greenery from the big bushes and put it all over the place.  My kids came in and kept commenting on how much they liked it.  That always makes me happy.  I think moms love making their homes a happy place for their kids.  They want them to always come back once they leave the nest.

I looked around and once again realized I was slowly but surely achieving the look I wanted and I hadn't spent a dime.  I love having the barn/store so close by!  When I lived in the city, if I had tried to acquire the things I nailed on my wall yesterday, I would have never been able to purchase them all at once.  It would have taken my shopping trips, picking one piece at a time....But there is more to the decorating than just a good deal.....

John MacArthur spoke yesterday about contentment, always wanting something else, never being content with what you have.  RM and I have realized we "need a guy" to help us finish off the work that isn't done.  But that "guy" is going to cost a lot of money to hire one day.  I guess I just decided to work with what I had, stop waiting for "the guy" to show up.  Contentment settled in, it always does, when I surrender my rights to having everything the way I want them when I want them.  Then blessings seem to come, like having my eyes opened to ugly chicken coop doors and yucky broken windows.  I've never been able to see that kind of beauty before, past the ugliness.  But I think that is one of the blessings that comes with contentment.

I'm not the first person to come up with this idea.  Ann Voskamp writes of this, too.  She describes what the French call it, "d'un beau affreux" - the ugly beautiful.  "That which is perceived as ugly transfigures into beautiful."  She says, "The ugly can be beautiful."  But she isn't talking about chicken coop doors with rat holes in them, though that is an awesome picture of it.  She is speaking about the ugly in our lives.  She goes on, "...the dark can give birth to life, suffering can deliver grace, bad can transfigure into good - the ugly can be beautiful."

When I first pulled that chicken coop door out of the barn, it had a big heavy board nailed to the bottom of it where the rats had been trying to get in.  How do I know?  Because we are battling rats right now.  Probably the same ones this other farmer battled, just generations of them that have come since he left!  They're everywhere.  In and around the coop, my husband's shop, in his office walls. We catch up to 5 a day in traps!!!!!  Gross!!!!!  That poor farmer, years ago, probably nailed that board on in anger, so frustrated with his chickens and eggs getting eaten.  I'm sure he never knew that one day, that very door would be cleaned up, taken off its hinges and hung on a wall in someone's house as decor!!!  He never saw the beauty in the ugly.  He just saw the rats.

I hang that door as a great reminder to me, to look for the beauty in the ugly, to look for the grace in the suffering, the light in the dark.  I need to stop seeing the rats. Yes, it's a pretty antique now, but that took time to get that look achieved.  My life is kind of like that door.  I'm in the antiquing process!  (literally!)  Right now, there are aspects of my life I absolutely love, but there are a few that I'd like to change.  Antiquing, becoming more beautiful, only comes with time.  Hebrews 12:11 says it best, "Later on, however.........it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace."  What produces that harvest?  The discipline of the Lord.  That is the way He "antiques" us.  That's how He makes the ugly beautiful. And my favourite part of that phrase is "Later on".  It only happens with time.  Just like the door took years to achieve that old, worn-out look.