Naming My Addiction

I do not like winter. The windows are frost-covered and I can't see out. The thermometer reads 12 degrees. Snow is piled high on sidewalks and streets and I wake early to have some moments of quiet before John gets up and the muscles in my shoulders arc into knots. 

Still reading in the Waymaker book, I come to a paragraph I could have written myself. It is searingly convicting. She writes, "Name your pain, name the way you try to make your pain go away, and name your addiction. Name your default direction. Name the way you turn for comfort and name your Egypt that looks like ease."  And so I'm naming my "addiction." It's called Zillow! Or Realtor.com! It's hours and hours of looking at houses online and imagining that one could be mine - my place of comfort, my way to escape this dementia prison. I've been doing it every day for nearly a year - ever since I so foolishly thought I could act on it, long before it was time. And even though there is clearly no sin in looking at houses for sale and dreaming a little, how many hours did it steal from my time with the Lord?

Voskamp, author of Waymaker, writes, "The only way through is to find the curve and bend of our own hearts and bend the knee to a realer and better love." I hope this makes you laugh: I honestly misread the word "realer" (is that a real word?) and thought it said "bend the knee to a REALTOR!" When I realized my mistake I definitely laughed out loud!  And I prayed, "Father, You have such amazing, creative ways to lay bare our idols and reveal to us our wrong turns. In essence I've been bowing my knee to a virtual realtor, trying to find my place of comfort, my Egypt. I've been begging You, Lord, to show me where I can find a "new chapter" of my stalled life - and You remain silent - because You're not ready yet to turn the page!"

Ann Voskamp says, "at the heart of all addictions is a broken attachment that left a broken heart." It's so true. I do have a broken attachment with my husband, who is still physically here but  no longer present in mind. On Valentine's Day in years past, he would have burst through the front door, grinning from ear to ear as he handed me a dozen beautiful roses. And it always touched me that he made that more important than his birthday - which is Valentine's Day! 

I hear the chirping of the sparrow couple at their little log house on my front porch. They too got very confused and lost all direction when the January weather became strangely, unusually warm.  I noticed them in the nest, cleaning out last year's mess of feathers and twigs, and then I saw that Mama Sparrow was SITTING in the house! But today it's a 12-degree February winter chill and I wonder what she's going through. Are there eggs in there that will freeze? Did she spend too much time on Zillow and get ahead of God like I did?

The thing I must do now is stop longing and seeking for a new house, a new chapter, and begin again to seek the One who writes the story, who quiets the pain, who makes me to find the comfort I need right here in this little yellow house He so generously and miraculously bestowed on me almost 18 years ago. 

18! That's the number of Life! My Father wants me to have life and have it abundantly, right here where I am - cozy, safe, warm. No more bending the knee to a realtor!