WARMTH - Heidi's House Reflections

Shortly after we moved, I was asked often if I had a favorite part of our house, or if there was something about the new house that I especially was enjoying.  A great inquiry - one that I would ask others too.

Well, yes. Yes to everything: the whole house is my favorite part and I am especially enjoying all of it, the view, the quiet, the cleanness, the built correctly-ness, the brightness, the windows, on and on and on...

However, the one thing that always makes me smile outwardly or inwardly is this:

A sink full of dishes to wash?!

Well, yes and no. In our new home, each time I turn on the water and wait for the warm water to come, it comes. And that is what makes me smile - it actually catches me by surprise sometimes at how quickly it comes.

It isn't that our old house didn't have hot water. It did - we usually always had hot water for showers like any family that showers all at the same time. However, many times, we didn't have hot water for very long, or very hot. Most all the time, I filled up a cooking pot with soapy water to wash dishes because the sink never filled up with water warm enough to wash. We had a couple of flash heaters and without going into much detail, some of them worked better than others.

However, now, it works all the time.

Now, not always having hot water was an opportunity to discipline my thought life and my reactions to my circumstances. I love a perfect world and sometimes I can spend quite a bit of time constructing my ideal world in my head. It was a bummer to have water disappointments for sure, and I got into the habit of thinking about others who don't have any water at all, or it's so polluted it's unusable, and many times would pray for them and the organizations who are trying to change that for those parts of the world. Now that's a quick attitude check for sure.

I catch myself doing the same thing here in my new house, so happy for the warmth on my hands, that I still pray for those who don't have it.

And the sister to warm water is a warm house. It hasn't gotten too cold yet here in Poland, but when it gets chilly and we turn the heat on, the house warms up. Woohoo!

Jillian came home sick last week, temperature and the chills. She went straight to bed. Later when I checked on her, a waft of hot air escaped as I opened her bedroom door. Her whole room was sooooo warm, too warm perhaps. She was snuggled under her covers resting and her room was so warm because she turned her radiator temperature up high. Well, that's what we did in the old house and the room was still drafty - only the radiator was hot.

Another smile and a quick prayer of thanks for our warm house with a furnace that heats both the house and the water; windows that keep the warmth in and the cold out.

So far, that's my favorite everyday thing about our new place.