The reason this song gets to me? Not because I'm a huge Miranda Lambert fan, although I'm sure she's great. It's because there was such a house in my life. It wasn't a house I grew up in, and in fact, I only lived there about a year and a half. When I was in 8th grade, my parents fulfilled their life-long dream and bought a piece of property in Fredericksburg, Texas to build their house on a hilltop. It was a beautiful piece of land at the end of a cul-de-sac on a country road. The road even had a lovely name - Countryside Bend. I'm really into street names, so the name was a nice bonus.
My family then proceeded to plan and build the house that would sit on the top of that hill. I don't mean "build a house" in the typical sense, where you find a builder and look at floorplans and choose the various finishes and fixtures. I meant BUILD A HOUSE. My parents drew up the floorplans themselves. My dad, who at the time was teaching high school, would come home from teaching each day, eat dinner, and then head out to the hilltop with our Border Collie, Patches, to work on the house all night. He would then come home and take a shower and a nap for a couple of hours before repeating the process again. FOR TWO YEARS.
Weekends involved our whole family on the hilltop pitching in together with whatever friends or extended family made their way down to the cul-de-sac to lend a hand. I learned the nuts and bolts of building a home. I learned what trusses were and how to carry them up the hill with my brother. I learned how to operate a nail gun, screwdriver, and a variety of other power tools. I learned that I'm a night owl like my father and that spending a night working on a house together is pretty quality father-daughter bonding time. I learned that I was strong and capable and that my dad is one talented, patient, and dauntless guy. I know it sounds corny, but I learned about teamwork as I watched my family pitch in and something wonderful start to take shape in front of our very eyes.
My parents, planning to spend their retirement years living on that hilltop, took great care to put their special touch on everything in the house. They painted and hung tin ceiling tiles in the kitchen. They made the ceilings ten feet tall on both stories of the house. When constructing the shower for the master bath, my dad called my mom in and asked her to show him how high she likes to hold her foot up when she shaves her legs - and then he built a tiled shelf into the shower at that level. I will never forget the way we sanded and sanded the rungs of the banister because my dad didn't want his grandchildren to hurt themselves when that time came.
The most special touch of all, in my opinion, was that the night before the sheetrock was to be hung, my dad spent the night praying in that house. He took a permanent marker and wrote scriptures and love notes to each of his children on the boards leading into our rooms. He sat in closets and stood in between the boards of the framing and prayed. Call it magical thinking, but that house always felt covered in prayer while we lived there. It could have been the hospitality of my parents, but I remember friends who spent the night saying that they felt like they were in church when they were at my house. It was almost as if the prayers had joined the lumber to frame the house, as if we were surrounded by peace and love and joy in every room because the prayers were as much a part of the house as the insulation.
Although they had planned to spend their lives there, my parents found themselves leaving their dream home after less than two years of living in it because they felt God leading them to a new job and a new town. It was inconceivable to me that we weren't going to stay there, that it would not be the house I would visit when I came home from college and the place I brought my children for Christmas. It was inconceivable to my parents, too, but their conviction in the new direction we were being taken allowed them to release their dream of growing old there, of drinking their morning coffee as they watched the deer out their bedroom windows, of sitting on the balcony and watching the sun set over the horizon. It was heart-wrenching to leave that house, because in some way, it had built each of us as we had built it.
I recently learned that there was a fire on Countryside Bend, and our two-story labor of love was burnt almost to the ground. As I cried over this news, I thought of the hours we spent together and the work that went into making every detail perfect. I thought of the pizza we consumed and the Dr. Pepper we drank as we tried to stay awake a few more hours to get a little more done before sunrise. I thought of the smell of sawdust, the sound of the nail gun, the paint on my old T-shirts and the sight of my mother driving up the hill to deliver yet another meal. I thought of my father's strong hands and the wondrous way he was able to turn my mother's dream into a reality. It occurred to me that the flames didn't take any of those memories from me. The lumber may have burned, but the way that house built our family into something stronger and more solid than ever before - that was untouched by the fire.
And then I thought of the prayers. The prayers I had always pictured as trapped inside of the walls. And suddenly an image came to me that provided almost instant healing from the sting of this sad news. I saw the house burning, but rather than the violent destruction of the flames, I saw something beautiful rising up to the sky.
It was the prayers, being released from the walls like burnt incense, an offering to the Lord.
Wow, Tobin. You have an amazing heart.
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