A Prayer for a “Humble but Sturdy” Home

I was sitting on the couch in my living room, in the house that we currently rent. We moved here to cut down on my husband’s commute time to work and because the rent was quite a bit cheaper.

And yet, since we’ve moved, we’ve discovered a trail of things of housekeeping-gone-wrong, which I’ve shared before and before.

I suppose you come to expect that when you’re living the renting lifestyle, where landlords don’t want to put in the money for quality upkeep because they expect you not to take care of it yourself. We’ve done our best to fix up the place as best we can and make it livable with some loving DIY ourselves, involving quite a bit of duck tape.

And we’re content with it, knowing that right now it is a good place for us because the rent is cheap and we're in a good neighborhood. But it also makes us aware of all the things we don’t want in a home whenever we do decide to buy a house someday.

While I don’t know when that time frame will be, I know at some point we do want to be able to buy a home. And because of that, it is something that I’ve been praying about since the hunt first began and continue to keep praying about even now, while the house-hunt is on hiatus.

So it was that from the cushion of my living room couch, I prayed, once again, for that someday house of ours: “I just want a humble, sturdy home! Nothing big and fancy, nothing that will crown us the Joneses. Just a home that we can settle into, that—sure, will have its fair share fixing-up to do—but without all the duct-taped headaches that have plagued us in our few months here."

And as I prayed that, I realized that it’s not just true for the home we plan someday to buy, but also for my own daily life: I want to have a humble, sturdy life. I don’t want to vie for fame or riches. I just want a life that is lived with purpose, a life where I can find contentment. Most of all, a life that has a sturdy foundation built on the Rock.

I smiled at the thought of all that God is teaching me in this little, ramshackle-of-sorts apartment. Without a doubt, I get annoyed every time something goes wrong, but the Lord always opens my eyes to some sort of silver lining that comes through, whether it’s a wake-up call about what home-ownership is like or heart issues that run deep, paving the way to what is sure to be a humble, sturdy life, after all.

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