How to Build a House {into a Family}

They build it with their own hands.

They build it in the angling sun and they are loud and happy and they pack in in all the gaps with handfuls of snow spraying like sweet sugar everywhere.

They talk of sleeping under stars and sleeping in coats under blankets and with a flashlight and candles and the dog, the dog right there at the door. When one lies down, they nudge on; they have this vision.

They say that this will be like nothing ever before, the most beautiful one ever. Levi pulls off his touque, hot and sweaty, and piles his snow high on the wall.

They build this snow house. They hand me a shovel.

'There needs to be a homemaker exercising some measure of skill, imagination, creativity, desire to fulfill needs and give pleasure to others in the family.

How precious a thing is the human family….  Does anything come forth without work?

The family is an art form.

And if human relationships are to be beautiful on a wider form,

the individual families making up a society have to be really worked on by someone who understands that

artists have to work to produce their art."

~ Edith Schaeffer, What is a Family?

They tell me that –

how they have sculpted something that will last beyond the next thaw.

That they have made a memory and what can erode that and wasn't it worth it?

If we build companies but lose the company of family and if we build visions but lose sight of relationship, have we only built these hollow canyons of pain?

Family is this altar you lie down on and build joy.

All that life in their cheeks, all that effort, all that love, it flames with a heat of it's own.

I watch how she works with that shovel.

How she crawls straight through that door in the wall, exhausted but smiling, her hair blowing long in the wind.

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Links for 2012-02-07 [del.icio.us]I Do: Struggle
@ The High Calling.... "Marriage doesn't get easier over time, but it gets less hard..."Happily ever after?
@ New Wineskins ... "I discovered that I fear romanticism because I feel inept in expressing it. Sue realized that this longing is planted in her soul as something too big for marriage to fill - a longing only God can satisfy." Secrets to a good marriage?Belonging and in-laws
@| The High Calling ... "Because when you say "I do," it's not just a marriage between two people at the altar." A poignant post about love and vows and the family you marry into...