Some years ago we traded in my old Volkswagen Super Beetle for our first piece
of new furniture: a mauve sofa. It was roughly the shade of Pepto-Bismol, but
because it represented to us a substantial investment, we thought "mauve"
sounded better.
The man at the furniture store warned us not to get it when he found out we had
small children. "You don't want a mauve sofa," he advised. "Get something the
color of dirt." But we had the naive optimism of young parenthood. "We know how
to handle our children," we said. "Give us the mauve sofa."
From that moment on, we all knew clearly the number one rule in the house. Don't
sit on the mauve sofa. Don't touch the mauve sofa. Don't play around the mauve
sofa. Don't eat on, breathe on, look at, or think about the mauve sofa. Remember
the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden? "On every other chair in the house you
may freely sit, but upon this sofa, the mauve sofa, you may not sit, for in the
day you sit thereupon, you shall surely die."
Then came The Fall.
One day there appeared on the mauve sofa a stain. A red stain. A red jelly
stain.
So my wife, who had chosen the mauve sofa and adored it, lined up our three
children in front of it: Laura, age four, and Mallory, two and a half, and
Johnny, six months.
"Do you see that, children?" She asked. "That's a stain. A red stain. A red
jelly stain. The man at the sofa store says it is not coming out. Not forever.
Do you know how long forever is, children? That's how long we're going to stand
here until one of you tells me who put the stain on the mauve sofa."
Mallory was the first to break. With trembling lips and tear-filled eyes she
said, "Laura did it." Laura passionately denied it. Then there was silence, for
the longest time. No one said a word. I knew the children wouldn't, for they had
never seen their mother so upset. I knew they wouldn't, because they knew that
if they did, they would spend eternity in the time-out chair.
I knew they wouldn't, because I was the one who put the red jelly stain on the
mauve sofa, and I knew I wasn't saying anything. I figured I would find a safe
place to confess-such as in a book I was going to write, maybe.
The truth is, of course, that we have all stained the sofa. Some of the stains
are small and barely noticeable. But some of them bleed through the entire
fabric of our lives. They are the stains we regret in the wee, cold hours of the
night as we lie in bed staring at the ceiling, wishing we could go back and
relive some moments and get things right this time. They may he the stains that,
if we don't regret, we ought to and we would if our hearts were working right.
We are all, to mimic the title of Cornelius Plantinga's remarkable hook, "not
the way we're supposed to be."
Ortberg, John. Life You've Always Wanted. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002, p.
127-128.
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