Yesterday I spent over an hour moving furniture around.  And it was pretty drastic.  We have a dinning room and what I call a parlor (living room) adjacent to it.  Normally the parlor has living room furniture in it and it serves as a nice place to gather in small groups.  Normally the dinning room has dinning room furniture in it that serves us well as a dinning room for smaller groups of friends.  But that is all changed.  The rooms are exactly the same as they were except now the dinning table and chairs are now in the parlor, and the parlor seating is now in the dinning room.  By re-arranging the furniture I changed the use of the rooms, and when our friends come over on Sunday for fellowship and a meal, they will be dinning in the parlor and sitting in the dinning room. In essence, the dinning room is now the parlor and the parlor now the dinning room. 

The moving of the furniture into their new placements changed the use of the rooms.  Another room in our home is being used as an office because it has office furniture and equipment in it, but the former owners had family room furniture in it and it was their family room.   So how much does what we have in a room, a space, or a place determine what the room is used for?  My recent experience confirms that it has a lot to do with it.  

And now unto our lives and the rest of the observations....

Our lives can be viewed as rooms.  We have a head room, a heart room, and history room, and dream room, a living room and a dinning room among others.  What we have in the nature of furniture is determining the use and atmosphere of those rooms.  And any time we want to change the nature and use of the room we can change the furnishings of those rooms.   We can take out the old, and bring in the new.  We can re-arrange our priorities and shift the use of the rooms into something more appropriate for our present day.  There are a lot of things that come to mind about our personal rooms and their furnishings that lead to the quality of life that we are living.  If our rooms are cluttered, messy places then our lives reflect that.  If our rooms are filled with treasures of revelation and truth then our lives show that.  And as we spend time in our rooms, we eventually live out before others what we live inside our own rooms.  

It is a good thing to look at our rooms from time to time to see if they have the right furnishings in them, furnishings that reflect the glory of the Lord and promote His desire for our lives. As we do this, some of us may want to do some house cleaning.  Others of us may want to re-arrange the use of our rooms to more completely fulfill God given desires.  And others of us may simply want to get rid of the old and bring in the new so we can be updated, shifting the atmosphere of our lives from historic to futuristic.  

Anyway, I like the change of view, it helps me think outside the box.  I am writing this in the dinning room that is now filled with parlor furniture, which is feeling very much like the parlor and not the dinning room as the result of the changes.  My view is shifted, looking out new windows, finding the blessing of a new space use, and looking forward to our time with our friends in the parlor, now a dinning room because of the furniture there.