Mama Bear Moxie: Chair mends torn pieces in our lives

There is a large, oversized chair that sits in the corner of my bedroom. We bought it very used and, quite frankly, it was a bit gross. However, I cleaned it the best I could, covered it with a bright yellow slip cover and added pillows to make it more presentable in my home.

I know that there will be a time when this chair goes to the burn pile. It is well past its prime, and its days are very well numbered. I know that I will be sad when I finally have to get rid of it. We call this chair “the mending chair.”

It got that nickname primarily because my sewing box sits next to it. This is the place in the house where all of the torn jeans, broken hems and anything worth saving goes so that I can (try to) mend it. Everyone in my house knows that any piece of clothing or material left on the chair will be looked over by me and sewn if needed.

Sometimes the sewing is great, while other times it is just a mere Band-Aid to keep us from having to purchase a replacement. I usually find that need to sew something at least once per week, and it always surprises me at the number of holes, tears and broken edges that can happen in our household.

Maybe it is where we live and our lifestyle of working hard outdoors, but there seems to be always something that needs attention on the mending chair. I love my mending chair because it has a double meaning. Next to this chair also sits a small table that holds my Bible, a journal and a pen.

If I am having a hard day or need to pray about something, I go to the mending chair. It was a permanent part of my day when we were trying to adopt our daughter and kept on running into roadblocks during our journey. Whenever we got bad news, you could usually find me sometime afterward sitting in the mending chair in deep thought.

My kids know that this chair is a place of refuge. It is a place to be quiet, still and ponder. Many times, they will find me in my chair and come snuggle alongside me for quiet time. Other times, they know not to bother me if they find me in my chair with tears streaming down my face.

The mending chair is the place in our home where items are physically mended. It also is the place in our home where hearts and minds are renewed. It sits away from the chaos of the day in a quiet corner by itself. This beloved chair has become a daily stop for me to find peace and work through the gritty aspects of life that tend to rub me the wrong way.

I have found that the mending of hearts and minds happens much more often than the actual mending of material. The chair is used much more for these emotional and spiritual ailments than it is the physical ones.

So while this actual chair will be gone one day, it will be replaced with another mending chair that I hope is just as comfortable. Because it’s not the actual chair that makes the difference but the location and meaning behind the space in my home that mends so many torn pieces in our lives.