Chasing The Wind

The front door was open.

I’d followed the bright signs from the highway and they had led me here: to this quiet neighborhood. To this stranger’s house. To this open door.

I wandered into the barren entryway, a lonely threadbare doormat with a price tag on it watching me from the floor.

“Everything is half off!” a businesslike woman yelled brusquely from the living room. “It’s the last day. Everything must go.”

I stepped into the living room, my eyes drifting to the empty walls. The lonely hearth.

A woman had lived here, that much was clear. Her small jackets still hung in the coat closet. Her tidy, old mauve rugs were neatly displayed to their best advantage on the floor with bright tags hanging from their worn tassels.

I walked in further.

A collection of mugs sat in a line on the kitchen bar. Mugs from all different states. Perhaps they were states she had once traveled through, years ago. Perhaps each mug had represented a story to her. Perhaps she had traveled with someone she’d loved. They were 25 cents each now.

I ran my hands over the worn handles, imagining I was her – this faceless stranger whose home I was in. Whose voice I would never hear and whose story I could only imagine.

Her pantries were open, everything in them on display and for sale. Half off, too. Everything had to go.

I saw a doorway and walked through it as a couple was walking out, an electric fan in their hands and the look of hunters about them.

“Should we hit the next sale up the road?” the man asked. The woman nodded as they headed for the front of the house.

I was standing in her bedroom.

Her bed frame was still there beneath two curtainless windows, her nightstand beside it with a single doily and a small clock on top. A box of jewelry sat on her dresser. I glimpsed a thin leather watch. A string of costume pearls. A butterfly pin.

Her closet door was open, and I walked in.

Her humble collection of clothing was lovely and all neatly hung. Clean and well loved shoes. A few small purses, pants and a belt. Practical sweaters. That was it.

I walked back into her small, quiet room and spotted the worn bible beside her bed.

That was it. Her long, exciting, heartbreaking, thrilling, grief ridden, love filled life, her story – reduced to a few rooms and trinkets as a group of strangers wandered through, choosing what had value, what didn’t. What was worth saving, what wasn’t.

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine her, the early afternoon sunlight coming through her bedroom windows and warming my skin.

“Everything is half off!” I heard a voice say from the living room. “It’s the last day. Everything must go!”

My mind had been in the shadows lately, and as my spirit clouded once more, I momentarily regretted stepping through these doors. I pictured my own home 50 years from now looking all too similar to this barren place: people I didn’t know wandering through my hallways made of walls that felt unnaturally empty. That had never been the plan. I’d always envisioned stacks of pictures of wild haired children cluttering our home, but with my rapid and unpredictable health decline in our first year of marriage, the pictures we’d imagined on our walls had slowly been disappearing from our minds.

My heart was a sinking ship. It sank for myself. For my husband. For the future we had once imagined. For the legacy we’d dreamed of leaving behind one day.

I’d always believed I was meant to be a mother. I had always wanted to share my life in that way. I wanted to show my children the world. I wanted to teach them things, like to love the premature smile lines around our mouths from laughing too much. How to embrace our frizzy hair and call it curly. How to serve. I wanted my husband to show them how to create something beautiful from nothing. What it was like to wake up on top of a mountain. I wanted my father to show them the glories of the heavens in the expanse of the skies from the back field on our property on a moonless night and I wanted my mother to read them her children’s books from the safe cocoon of her arms.

I wanted them to remember me when I was gone.

I’d always imagined our kids, our grandkids, our great grandkids would be the ones standing in our comfortably cluttered home when our time came, the ones packing up our belongings and laughing as they told stories about our crazy family, crying happy tears of remembrance as they chose who got the sea glass wind chimes we made on that vacation to Seaside and who got the beat up record player we used to blast that America album on until everyone knew Ventura Highway by heart.

And so I mourned.

I stood in a strangers’ bedroom and I mourned for a future that hadn’t happened.

What will I have to leave behind?

Jesus has a beautiful way of meeting me where I am, gently reminding me of the simplest things.

“Store your treasures in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal.” -Matthew 6:20

I repeated this to myself a few times, bailing out saltwater by the bucketful from my prematurely capsizing heart. But what did it really mean for me?

I’d always imagined my kids would be the treasures I left behind. But truthfully that wasn’t all I’d imagined, for I was full of honest to goodness simple pride: I also imagined I’d finish college one day as I raised the kids. Get the next degree, maybe go for another. Get healthy again. Really and truly healthy. Be able to get that great job back. Start the climb again. Finish that book. Be recognized for my work. Become successful. Have solid content consistently flying from beneath my fingertips that was read, appreciated and connected with. In a way, I imagined my worldly success would also be my legacy.

But what does the Word say?

Towards the end of Solomon’s life, he wrote a message to the people about his lengthy personal experiences. He wrote about how empty the pursuit of worldly treasures and satisfaction was without the Father. He found that after all the years of work and play, after all the time, energy and great resources spent on the pursuit of happiness, God was the only reward that was eternal. All else was pointless, empty and ultimately meaningless.

“But as I looked at everything I had worked so hard to accomplish, it was all so meaningless – liked chasing the wind. There was nothing really worthwhile anywhere.” – Ecclesiastes 2:11

What at first looks like a sad story turns out to be a book of hope, encouraging the people of the past and the future to let go of the things that don’t really matter and to focus on the One who truly does.

As a living breathing flawed human being, I constantly try to stay in control of my own life here on this earth, but I don’t have to. I don’t have to plan out every career detail, every family detail, I don’t have to know what’s going to happen down the road with the hopes that we have – I can release that burden and let Christ lead. This doesn’t mean I don’t have to try. This doesn’t mean I stop living my life while I’m here in this world, whether I ever end up raising a family or pursuing a career, or both or neither, because God gave me these experiences to have. But it does mean that I start being more intentional about my pursuits. It does mean that I work hard and pray to let go of my ideas of worldly success, and the earthly legacies I thought, hoped and dreamed I’d leave behind… because it’s true. No matter how hard I worked for it on this earth – in the end, everything here must go.

So I’ll take a moment. I’ll stop. I’ll breathe. I’ll look up. In the end, the effort I put towards the Kingdom is the only thing that will truly last.

I took a deep breath and looked around this beautiful stranger’s bedroom one more time as I prepared to leave. Maybe she didn’t have a cluttered mantle or a crowded closet for the neighborhood to sift through on this Sunday afternoon, but it didn’t matter. I felt that familiar line around my mouth start to deepen in a small smile and I looked up. I might not know the legacy she left behind, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to know it for it to mean something.

He knew hers.

He would know mine.