A Moment in Time

I am sitting in the dark in a rocking chair next to a bunkbed. Across the room an old mantel still presides over a closed-up fireplace, one of five in our house that feed into a massive central chimney. Our home is built in a style called center-chimney colonial, common in 18th century northern New England. The blond wood bunkbed came from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, purchased from a missionary family who used it for their own children but decided not to move it home at the end of theirten year stay in Asia. They were moving back to the states while we were moving to Malaysia, so we bought some of their furniture and adopted their cat. We used the beds for two years there, and decided we would ship them home to the US when we returned. The children sleeping in the bunkbed were born in Woliso, Ethiopia. We brought them home with us just two weeks ago. The rocking chair belonged to my mother-in-law from Ohio.

I am amazed at how much diverse history and culture have come together in this one, small room. The builders of this house may have never heard of Ethiopia or Malaysia, the Malaysian craftsmen who made the bed and dressers have probably never seen a house that looks like this one. The Ethiopian mother of the children sleeping (actually not sleeping) in the bed has never lived in a house with running water or electricity, has never seen snow or imagined central heat. The children have no notion of the age of the house; they probably think every house in America has big, drafty windows with 24 panes of glass and splintery stairs that creak. The whole combination is bizarre.

But it is all part of a grand plan. The house was built to serve many purposes; one of them,unbeknownst to the craftsmen who built it,was to shelter our family 200 years after the foundation was laid in ancient granite. The used furniture ad on the internet served to provide us not only with bunkbeds, but with a friendship that now extends to the Middle East. When we brought the bunkbed home with us just three years ago we had no idea that we'd be putting two little African girls to sleep in it. My mother-in-law passed away less than two years ago, without ever knowing about the granddaughters who would be rocked to sleep in her lovely, caned chair. The pattern is a mystery to me, I who am merely a thread in a complex design that spans centuries and cultures, encompassing people and places and objects and time. Still, it comforts me as I sit here in the dark, to know an Intention greater and wiser than my own is at work in this room.