The Rituals of Our Lives

A few weeks ago I completed an annual fall ritual—I put up the plastic film covering the skylights in our bedroom. The skylights are high-quality, double-paned windows, but they are right above where we sleep. Without the added plastic film in the winter, there’s just enough of a cold draft to make it hard for me to sleep.

I always resist putting up the plastic as long as possible. It’s an admission that the warmth and sunshine of summer are gone and all that lies ahead until spring is cold and gloom. The plastic covers the whole cutout for the window, so once the plastic goes up, we can no longer reach the window to raise or lower the blinds. So most years we lower the blinds before putting the plastic up—this makes it darker at night when we’re trying to sleep, but it also means our bedroom is that much darker all day long as well. And those precious few days in the winter when the sun does manage to break through the clouds, our bedroom stays a dark and gloomy place.

The skylights are built into the slanted roof of our house. Because they’re on a slant, the plastic has a particularly difficult time staying put. This means that inevitably, the first night I put the plastic up, the double-sided tape they give you to put on the frame of the window starts to give way and we wake up in the middle of the night with plastic falling down on top of us. This usually results in me trying to add a layer or two of packing tape around the outside edge of the plastic the next morning.

All this to say that by springtime, when the first warm breeze arrives and the voice of the turtle is again heard in the land, and I rip off the plastic like I’m a kid opening a Christmas gift and crank open the skylights to let that breeze into the stale air of the upstairs, the walls around the skylights are in rough shape. Indeed, as I pull the plastic off, I inevitably pull a layer or two of paint off with it. I’ve learned to keep a generous supply of touch up paint that color in the house.

Sometimes I even take some of the drywall mud off with the paint, and there’s a bit of a gouge in the wall above our bed where the plastic had been hanging. Just as putting up the plastic is a fall ritual, so repairing the wall when I take the plastic down is a spring ritual. Only, I don’t always get to it in the spring. I typically tear down the plastic on a whim, deciding that spring is finally here—or at least right around the corner—and we won’t need this plastic any longer and the lure of the fresh breeze overcomes my fear of the nightly draft. I can tear down the plastic in about three minutes, but it can take a couple of hours over the course of a couple of days to repair and repaint the walls—especially if it takes more than one coat.

And so I don’t always get to it right away. And as the weather turns nice in the spring, there are so many other things I’d rather be doing outside than repairing the walls inside our bedroom. And so, I’m afraid to say, more years than not, the walls stay gouged all summer long—with me thinking that I’ll get to that one of these days… And then fall comes. And it’s time to put the plastic back up—only the walls aren’t fixed yet, so I figure I better do that first. So many years, it’s not until I need to put the plastic back up that I finally get around to repairing the walls from when I tore the plastic down in the spring.

Elizabeth is gracious about the whole cycle, and mostly just shakes her head as she sees me head up to the bedroom with a can of paint at the end of October. It is an odd, somewhat humorous, somewhat frustrating ritual that we go through each year. And in a strange way, it marks the passing of the seasons, the passing of time, perhaps as well as anything else in our lives—especially this year as the usual birthday celebrations, Thanksgiving and Christmas will all look dramatically different because of the coronavirus.

This summer Elizabeth and I had the pleasure of conducting the wedding of Joshua Hiemstra and Meredith Fennema. It was a small wedding, outdoors in Meredith’s parents’ backyard. One of the texts Josh and Meredith selected was 1 Samuel 7:13-17. It’s a bit of an obscure text—it details the later years of Samuel’s life as prophet in Israel, and it describes him as traveling from town to town to town in a large circuit and repeating this year after year after year. Living out his life in faithful service.

We pointed out to them that this was not a typical wedding text, but they wanted to use it anyway—they liked the idea of the routine being holy. Of our everyday actions being service to God. Of the rituals of our lives—whether they are the daily rituals or the monthly rituals or the yearly rituals—being a sign of our faithfulness and love.

Indeed, the rituals of our lives mark off our lives—but they are so much more than mere timekeepers. Regardless of whether they are the daily rituals or the yearly rituals, they can be a mark of our faithfulness. A sign of our love. A way we orient our lives to God and to others. It doesn’t matter whether we are married or single, our faith is primarily lived out in our everyday, day-to-day and year-to-year actions.

Next spring, when the plastic comes down again and the paint comes off the walls with it, I’m going to look at the ritual of wall repair in a whole new light. And hopefully, when October rolls around, I won’t be heading upstairs with a can of paint in my hands.