The question reminded me of another, much smaller purchase that I made in my early teens. My dad’s mother was known for doing two things every day: drinking coffee and saying prayers. For Christmas, my brothers and I found a gift that combined both of these interests: a coffee cup with the Lord’s prayer printed on one side of it. As perfect as the gift seemed, I remember coming back the following Christmas to find it still sitting under the tree.

“Why is the cup we gave you last Christmas still under the tree?” I asked.

“It’s too pretty to use,” my grandma explained.

I never understood her reasoning. Was she implying that the cup was more important than the person we wanted to drink from it?

Grandma packed our gift away with the Christmas decorations for more than a decade. That’s where I found it when I returned to her house after her death to help box up some of her things.

“Do you want to keep it?” one of my brothers asked.

“No,” I replied. “She never used it so it doesn’t mean anything to me.”

What did mean something to me was the bedroom set that my grandma and grandpa bought in the early 1930s. When my parents divorced in the 1970s, Grandma gave it to my dad so that I would have a place to sleep when my brothers and I stayed with him. Unlike the cup, both the bed and dresser were beat up from years of use. I didn’t care. My oldest daughter is named after my father’s mother. It seemed fitting to replace the bunk beds in Katie’s room with the antique bed that once belonged to her namesake. The fact that some of the scratches came from the years that I used it only added to its meaning as we loaded the set into our van and brought it back to Illinois.

Seeing firsthand how use leads to meaning made me realize: our dining room table was not too good to use; it was too good not to.

I don’t want the things that I like most in our home to mean nothing because they have no memories attached to them. And I don’t want to send the message that a dining room table means more than the people it is intended to serve. I guess that’s why I agreed that ours would be used to serve my daughter and her friends as they sat down for a game of bingo.

While Bill called out the letters and numbers, I retreated to the kitchen to get ready for the next activity. A few minutes later, a party guest appeared to inform me of a problem in the other room.

“Mrs. Albin, someone spilled her bottle of perfume on the table.”

This was the moment I had dreaded. The one where I could morph into an uptight mom who threatened to upset everyone at the party or remain calm as I followed her into the dining room to inspect the damage.

“Thank you for letting me know,” I told the girl. “The tablecloth is waterproof so I’ll wait until everyone is done playing to clean it up.”

I was pleased with myself for allowing the game to continue and not making a big deal out of another person’s mistake. Only after the party was over did my smile fade as I removed the tablecloth to find that, although it was water-resistant, the fabric was no match for chemicals as the perfume seeped through to stain the wood underneath.

For days after the party, I couldn’t stop thinking about the damage to our table. Every time I walked by the dining room, I was reminded of the incident and robbed of my peace.

How could doing the right thing lead to such a wrong result? I wondered as the stain glared at me from across the room.

If Dr. Stanley had been available for an in-house consultation, he might have offered this explanation: “God may allow a situation in your life to develop stronger faith, grow and mature, or change a bad habit or negative attitude. But God does not set you up for anxiety. He is always at work to bring you to a place where you will trust Him more, obey Him more fully, and receive more of His blessings.”[iv]

The blessing that I was about to receive came in the form of a question: What if that stain was—not an upsetting incidence—but visual evidence of a mom who put people over possessions?

Sometimes, you have to redefine success to realize it. Reshaping how I saw the situation did more than relieve me of resentment and guilt; it reaffirmed my belief that, while good intentions don't guarantee a good outcome, a good outlook does as we rely on Romans 8:28 and trust God to work out all things for the good of those who seek to do His will.

Dr. Stanley agreed on page 117 of Finding Peace when he wrote: “If we are truly being obedient to God’s commands and we are following His purpose for our lives to the best of our abilities, then God is fully committed to working all things together for our good—both our eternal rewards and our earthly blessings.”

“But if we are just roaming through life on our own initiatives and at our own whims and wills,” the author continued, “if we are not seeking God’s purpose, if we are obeying God only when it suits us, if we are yielding to the directives of the Holy Spirit only when we find ourselves in a difficult situation, on what basis can we truly expect God to work things out to our eternal benefit?”

Katie turns eleven on February 5th. To celebrate, we’re having another in-home birthday party where every guest will have a seat at our dining room table and a first look at Katie’s newly-restored bedroom set (which we are giving her as a birthday gift).

When we stopped at the furniture restoration shop last weekend to pick out a stain color, I was amazed by how wonderful the pieces looked after being returned to their original, unfinished condition. Only a few blemishes were so deep that no amount of sanding would remove them.

“We call them character marks,” the owner of the shop explained with a smile.

Surprisingly, I understood what he meant. We can’t remove every stain that leaves a mark on our life, but we can reshape how we view it. When we do, it's nice to know that bad memories—like bedroom sets—can be restored.

Quotes to Grow On