Is your house big enough? Do you need more room? Will your family be happier in a bigger home?
I think my perspective on this issue was shaped a bit last week by a converation I had with a few members of an American family that has lived and worked most of the time over the last nine years in the foothills of the Himalayas.
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As I have intimated in some recent posts in
my personal blog, my wife and I spent last week in Thailand with field staff of one of the international charities we help fund.
While there, I volunteered to work on the security detail. As I sat in front of the bookstore they had set up checking people’s ID tags, I stopped a couple of young girls because I couldn’t see their wristbands.
One of them looked at me with a bit more than passing interest: “Are you Mr. Holzmann?”
“Yes.”
She lit up. “We use Sonlight!”
I won’t bore you with the details of that portion of our conversation.
It turns out, they are two children in a family of five kids. They live somewhere in the foothills of the Himalayas and move twice a year to live with a certain nomadic water buffalo-herding tribe that has a summer home and a winter home.
Interesting people!
About 10 or 15 minutes after we began talking, their dad came up. And the subject matter of our discussion broadened a bit. I asked him more about their living circumstances and how one lives with nomads. –I had never met anyone from the West who had adopted and/or adapted to such a lifestyle.
For some reason I can’t remember now, at one point, the dad made a comment that has stuck with me: “When we go back to the States,” he said, “I have found that families with five or more kids always seem to have more room to invite us in than do families with only one or two children. Even families with huge houses and just one child: they never seem to have room to invite us to stay with them. But families with five kids–even though their houses are much smaller: they always have room.
“We may sleep on the floor (which is fine with us). But they always have room. The more kids they have, the more room they seem to have.”
My thought: The physical space is rarely the issue. More often, we are limited by the size of our heart.
Indeed, as I was thinking about what my new friend had to say, I remembered our family’s time in southern California 20 years ago.
We lived in an 800-square-foot hovel. I think that’s the right word. It had holes in the outside walls so big you could see daylight through them when it was light outside and, in the winter, the wind would blow the kitchen cupboards open. For the kids to go to the bathroom, they had to walk through every room in the house–from their room, through Sarita’s and my bedroom, through the living room area, through the kitchen, through the back hallway (where the water heater was) and into the bathroom.
All four children–two girls and two boys–shared a single bedroom
And y’know what? No one complained!
In fact, though we owned four beds (two bunkbeds), until just a few months before we moved (when our eldest daughter was about 11 and a half), all four children preferred to sleep in one bed. We used to talk about how they were like sausages in a container. They preferred to share the bed. There was something reassuring about that closeness, I think.
And our kids got along. They were close. Despite dramatic personality differences. Despite the age range. Despite the fact that they spent most of the time together because we were homeschooling as well.
The physical closeness, I think, actually contributed to our children interacting with each other. It helped enlarge their hearts to make room for others.
FWIW. I thought I’d share my thoughts.
And my prayer: May I have a heart big enough for whatever God calls me to . . . unhindered by my physical surroundings!
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