Magic Carpet Choices

Thu 02 Sep 2010 Filed in: My Life
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When I was a kid, carpets had a magical ability to captivate the imagination and transport the mind to far away places. This week we’ve had a different kind of carpet adventure. We’ve been on a carpet-buying quest, and it seemed a tad less magic than the carpets of old until we started trying to choose one. It’s not the kind of adventure I have often. Our carpeting is dead, but not yet buried, and so a couple of days ago, Suzanne and I found ourselves in the midst of a dizzying array of carpet samples. The early conclusion was that carpet stores have a lot more samples than paint stores have. And they’re a lot heavier. Different colors, styles, fibers, manufacturers, and different prices as well - life was undoubtedly simpler in the dirt floor days.

I’ve been told that people who move here from third world countries experience the same kind of bewilderment on their first trip to a supermarket. We are used to living in a world where countless choices give us the opportunity to tailor our lives to our individual preferences, and sometimes that is a good thing. The carpet store had something for everyone; all we had to do was figure out who we were.

The creative variety demonstrated by carpet manufacturers pales in comparison to that demonstrated by the Almighty. He is not a cookie-cutter God who mass-produces blessing for his people; he keeps each individual in mind. God knows me better than I know I myself and, miracle of grace that it is, takes delight in me anyway. He knows me; he loves me. And he’d have done just fine in the carpet store.
Happy