The Shape of Us

This morning, I stripped the sheets off of our bed to throw them in the wash. There on the mattress I could still see the weighted mark of where we slept. My side, your side, the shapes of us pressed into the memory foam.

I wonder how many years we’ll make these marks? How many shapes of us will be pressed into the world around us as we live, and move, and have our being. This bed, this 130 year old house, this old land.

When we leave, when this world is stripped of us, will our shapes remain somewhere? The curve and work of our hands and souls, will they last? Even for an afternoon?

I know you have shaped me, and I shape you, and in this we are both being made into something new. Our children grow and learn under, what I hope is, our tender and intentional molding. Or at least our tender and intentional honesty that we are also under the Potter’s Hands, and there are still things about all of us that need to be pressed and carved. I know when I look in the mirror I see the shape of my mother, my father, my grandmother, a long-lost ancestor who wrote poetry, who planted gardens, who prayed, who sang songs while cooking a meal. Her name may be forgotten but the shape of her is still pressed in me somewhere. I feel it in my bones.

We have turned fallow ground into fertile soil. We have poured fish fertilizer, chicken manure, a year’s worth of compost onto ground that looked barren and weedy. We worked it until we bled. We pressed our very hearts into the earth and prayed for rain, and now we reap the good things we’ve sown.

We do our best to love and push against the darkness where we can, our small human hand prints against a supernatural realm. We push against darkness in one another, searching for ways to bring the truth to hidden places. We push against it in our children, hoping that we might provide them the chance to see more clearly, walk more freely.

And so, as I shake out the warm sheets fresh out of the dryer to make our bed again, these marks of us, lingering after a long night, remind me to pray. To ask for help to be people of faithfulness, of righteousness, of prayer, of steadiness. To be so anchored in Christ, that our very souls bear the weight of Him, slowly shaping and bending those around us toward Him. So that even after we’re gone, somewhere down the line, those who follow will work, and sweat, and sing, and write, and might even feel within their bones the shape of something good, beautiful, and true. The shape of us.