Our Michigan house was built by my parents, and its rectangle kitchen was cleverly designed, with three entries: one to the bedroom hallway, one to the dining room where we took our evening and Sunday meals, and one to the back porch beside the telephone desk. On either side of the hallway door’s entrance began two paralleled counter tops, the stove on one side and the sink in the other.  The fridge stood adjacent to the stove side. The sink’s counter side stopped short, to provide passage into the breakfast room. Behind the sink was more counter, making its section an island with a rounded end graced by lower shelves to match the curve. An overhead cupboard was to the sink’s right and the rest of the island opened into the breakfast room. In that sweet room lived a yellow linoleum covered table that matched the floor, seven chairs, and the small telephone desk.  If you sat on the north side of the table, you could see evidence of the current season in the backyard, through divided window panes. If you sat on the south side, you saw the kitchen’s floor plan:  island sink, stove, refrigerator and door to the dining room and bedroom hallway.

In this warm room, we took breakfast and lunch, played table games like Monopoly, War, Parcheesi and checkers and my live-in grandpa played Cribbage every Friday night with Uncle Bernie there. On those kitchen walls, this three-year-old got crayons and scribbled from one corner to another before my mother caught me. And on the kitchen island my father laid me flat, to stitch a cut over my eye, when I fell headlong on the back-porch steps one rainy day in 1955. I still have the scar from that cut on my body.

Deeper still, I have the imprint of that yellow kitchen, in my memory.

What indelible scar do you carry in your body? What memory from your childhood home?

~A Prayer~

Thank You, Lord that You see all that happens to us. You see us in our childhood kitchens, you see us today.  You heal us of our cuts and wounds, because You love to show us mercy and kindness. Please bring this to those who are without it. Put them on our minds, so we can pray for them.

Please bless our good memories and heal us of what brought us scars. Thank you that scars are evidence of Your presence, then and now. Thank you for salvation through Jesus who for our sake, endured scorn, false accusations, assault and battery, and a criminal’s death, to provide for us a life where we can have a kitchen place on earth, where we might learn of Your love. But even better, a place in your heavenly kingdom, the Big kingdom, the One that matters most of all.

“May Your kingdom come and Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Amen.  ~Matthew 6:10