The Couch

Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.

Matthew 24:35

This week we moved. We didn’t go far, just down the road a few miles. We moved from a townhouse that we’ve been in for 14 years to a single family home. We are grateful for what God has provided for us, but moving does funny things to you.

It’s been hard to let go of the old house. My wife and I tend to hold on to things. We first moved into the townhouse when we got back from our honeymoon. So our old house was the place where all the early marriage memories happened. It’s where we brought home each of our three kids from the hospital. Their first rooms, first beds, first steps…first everything happened in that house.

We had a backyard, side yard, living room and basement full of memories. Each bedroom had story after story of their life embedded into it. These are things that were hard to leave behind.

One of the hardest things to let go of surprised us all. It was the couch. We had this couch for 14 years. It was so stained and broken that we didn’t move it to the new house. When it was time to take it to the dump, our 8-year-old son jumped on it, held on tight, started crying, and told us not to take it. It was hard to watch.

So many individual and family memories happened on that couch. It’s where we had all our movie nights as a family. It’s where my wife nursed all our kids. It’s where she spent most mornings with the Lord. It’s where she and I counseled nearly 50 couples in premarital counseling. It’s where we relaxed at the end of each day and watched a show on TV.

That couch was saturated with life moments. It was saturated with the presence of the Lord. Yes, it was also saturated with odd smells and years of stains. It was full of what made up our life for the last 14 years.

I was the one to take it to the dump. I was the one to take it out of the back of the trailer and throw it over the edge into the refuse pile. I couldn’t have predicted how difficult that would be. All of that life, all of those moments, now seemingly in a pile of garbage. It seemed like the couch deserved more than that for all it had given us. I got choked up seeing it there.

Driving away from the garbage dump in tears, I tried to process things with the Lord. He reminded me that the couch was just wood, fabric and stuffing. It was a cheap couch from Value City Furniture. Most people don’t keep couches that long. But then the Lord gave me the word “embodied.”

By itself, the couch is just cheap materials. But it had been “filled with the Spirit” in a way. It had been filled with the spirit of our family, all our memories, and the presence of the Lord. Like the difference between the Jewish Law and Jesus. One is just a set of rules to obey and the other is a person to follow. The gospel of Jesus was always meant to be embodied, filled, full.

Over the years that couch, and our old house, became more than the sum of its parts. It became more than just cheap material. It became filled. It became full. It became embodied. Disembodied things are easy to throw away. Things that are full of the Spirit are hard to let go of.

God reminded me that what I threw away at the dump was just the material, not the memories. Like at a funeral, the corpse in the casket is just the skin and bones of the person but not the actual person. The spirit and soul of a person has left the body behind and gone on to be with the Lord, soon to receive a resurrected body.

God reminded me that I had to let go of the cheap material, but I didn’t have to let go of the moments, the memories, the presence. But who would have thought that all of this would have happened over a couch? It’s funny how connected we get to things that are saturated with Life.

As I looked around at the other items being thrown in the refuse pile, it was a good reminder. All of this is temporary. All the things we accumulate will end up here one day. Do we really want to give our life to accumulating things that are so easily thrown away, so easily taken away? Do we really want to spend our whole life accumulating things we can’t take with us into eternity? Or do we want to give our lives to something more lasting, more eternal, something that can’t ever be thrown away or taken from us?

Do not love the world or anything in the world…For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.

1 John 2:15-17