Threshold

Endurance is one of those qualities that everyone appreciates but nobody wants. Endurance is the grace to go on when things that matter remain undone; it's the ability to hope when year after year stumbles by without progress; it's the courage to engage with life even though engagement often spells discomfort, and sometimes pain.

To me, this threshold from our dining room to our living room stands for such endurance--it speaks to my wife's long patience with a ragged edge of 1960's gold-and-green carpet faded by the sun and worn threadbare with time. It wasn't just the carpet--it was that awful cut edge that grieved her for years . . . more than fifteen years.

Today that era has finally ended. It's not perfect, but there's now a reasonable transition from one room to another.

There are plenty of other "thresholds" that need work in our home--and in our life, other areas where we are living with glaring imperfections. But we aren't giving up because our hope is not in things we can see. We endure because our God is patiently enduring with us.

© March 2017 by Robert G. Robbins