Rev. Ray and Pat Amos
Let’s take a Monday morning stroll on Memory Lane to the back porch of the old homeplace. Usually they were like a workshop for daily life. There might have been a box of firewood, an extra bucket of coal, and brooms and mops for cleaning. Some had shelves that held about every kind of hardware and cans of “whatever” you might need. Did you have an old wringer washing machine? Was there a path worn in the grass to the clothesline for the Monday washing?
While the front porch was a place for sharing life with neighbors and family; the back porch was more for those everyday tasks that kept the wheels of home-life turning. It is the same with our Christian life. We need both, front-porch fellowship, and a back-porch routine of keeping our soul clean and in good maintenance to serve the Lord. What are those daily and weekly things that you do to make sure that your Christian Life is clean and strong?
I saw a sign that said, “Back door guest are the best.” There are relationship and friendships that share the most common and even mundane parts of life. They may even see one another’s dirty laundry, and it does not matter. I am thankful for a God who is willing to sit with us on the front-porch; and I am also thankful for a friend like Jesus who is a back-door guest. Even the dirty laundry of my soul does not lessen his love.
For some of us, those back-porch memories are of people who spent daily hours of scrubbing, fixing, and doing a multitude of love’s labor in order that we might be a home. Their hands were calloused and wrinkled by the work they did; yet their heart was soft with love. Perhaps we had to wait until we were older to realize and appreciate what they did.
“Precious memories, how they linger
How they ever flood my soul
In the stillness of the midnight
Precious sacred scenes unfold.”
Grace and Peace, Rev Ray
