Losing to a Rug

I had an epiphany this week. Despite having painted my bedroom in the new house a clean, bright yellow and having arranged my furniture in what I thought a visually pleasing manner, I have been unhappy with the results. Up until this week I could not figure out what was niggling me about the room, even though I pondered the problem often. When I moved into the new house I gave my brother my old orange persian rug. It never matched anything in a room of blues, white, and yellows. Instead I put a small green rug at the side of my bed to catch my feet on cold mornings. This week I realized that the little green rug looked lost in a vast expanse of hardwood floor and seemed anchored to nothing. Inspiration struck somehow, and I moved the rug into a diagonal position in front of the blue armchair in the corner. The effect was as if earth and heaven had come together. Just one small detail like that, once it became anchored to another object, all of a sudden had an identity of its own.

Each piece, although individual and unique, needs something within the whole to anchor it, to fix it, and to give it identity. It could be that I've just had Bonhoeffer and Paul's epistles on the brain recently, and I don't want to be super-spiritual, but it struck me that this is also a spiritual truth about our place within the body of Christ. Who knew that losing to a rug could mean finding an important, encouraging truth?