Excerpts

From the back cover:

Even when it houses weak and hurting people, home is a place where God finds us and we Him, where God heals us, where God lives with us.

In this reflection, Woodlief takes you through his own house, room by room, revealing in his deliciously witty signature style all the ways a house can become:

A union of the sacred and the earthly;

A sanctuary from which we cry out to a God who is ever in the small things;

A home, where everything is covered in peanut butter and grace.

Woodlief’s uplifting narrative will appeal to a wide audience, especially those trying to reconcile the idea of a loving God with a broken world.

From the Introduction:

I am standing outside my own front door, girding myself for battle. I am home from another fruitless day in a job that I hold down because it pays the bills. All I want, really, is a beer and a foot rub. Instead I am about to be the target of crotch- level flying tackles from my children. In these moments it helps to pause, and collect one’s thoughts, and try to remember what one learned in karate class years ago about deflecting groin strikes. I know they don’t mean any harm by it. This is how they show they love me. There are many definitions of home, and perhaps this is one of them: the place where sometimes we are wounded.

From Listen: The doorstep of heaven (Chapter 8):

Eli makes bookmarks and gives them to me. He makes long skinny ones and flimsy square ones. Sometimes he cuts out a raggedy circle, or an awkward heart. He colors his creation as best he can, or draws a picture of us playing together. On some he writes things that he would never say out loud, like, “Dad, I love you so much.” Sometimes he fashions his gift out of a scrap sheet, and other times he uses scalloped scissors to craft his bookmark from a thick piece of art paper. He leaves them for me on my nightstand, or my desk, or sometimes he overcomes his shyness and gives one to me directly, saying simply, “I made this for you.” When Eli does this I wrap him up in my arms and squeeze him for an extra- long time. This is how you have to hug Eli, because he can be like hardened ground that the rain takes longer to soften.

Last year Eli gave me a flashlight for Christmas. So did Caleb. They know I already have one under my bed, another in my nightstand drawer, and a little one on top of my dresser. I guess they believe a man can never have too many flashlights. I suppose they’re right. When your piece of earth turns its back to the sun and darkness settles on you like black snow, you want more than anything a little scrap of light to show you the way.

When Isaac gives me a gift it is inevitably chewing gum. I’ll find a foil-wrapped stick on my computer keyboard or nuzzled up beside a book I’ve been reading, and I’ll know Isaac has been thinking about me. Sometimes he sidles up next to me with a pack of gum in his hand, sporting an expansive air, looking for all the world like a tycoon tipping the doorman as he peels a stick from his gum wallet and drops it in my lap. Chewing gum is Isaac’s favorite. He would take gum over ice cream or even cake. We limit his gum intake—the current rule is that he can have it only on Sundays — because he never spits it out without an explicit instruction to do so, and with four children it’s hard to remember that your four-year-old has been chewing the same piece of gum for ten hours.

I suppose our strictness about gum makes it all the more precious to Isaac. This is why he can’t think of a better gift to give to someone he loves. My instinct would be to hoard something that precious, the way I’m reluctant, for example, to offer guests my favorite — and expensive — brand of chocolate-chip ice cream when I’ve been lucky enough to find it on sale. Isaac’s instinct, however, is to share the things that are precious to him.

I’ve been thinking about these gifts from my children. Homemade bookmarks, cheap flashlights, and a few sticks of gum are hardly worth including in the nation’s gross domestic product. Neither, I suppose, are the few quarts of grape juice or wine, along with the handful of bread or crackers, that you will consume in a lifetime of taking communion. Somehow in our supersized culture we came to believe that if God were real, he would manifest himself like a rock star. Occasionally a preacher or a singer comes along and gives us that rock star God experience, but mostly the things of God are manifested in the murmur of a priest or preacher, the croaking of a congregation’s song, the sometimes blissful and other times dreadful silence of our prayers.