Once I got around to the job--which, admittedly, took some years --actually fixing the kitchen cabinet doors took about 15 minutes. One of them I can't do anything about; it had been destroyed by a kick from an angry foot and will have to be replaced. But the others, the ones that hung and swung askew, simply needed to have the hinge screws tightened or (in two cases) replaced. No big deal.

So: why did "no big deal" take me such a godalmighty time to get around to? Busyness, partly, but someone who spends as much time with computer games and E-mail as I do really has no excuse. I could give you a variety of reasons--I'm not a handyperson, I wasn't sure how to handle the problem--but that's not entirely true either. It was a very easy job to figure out, and I am reasonably ept at problem-solving.

All I can tell you is the simple truth: I'd long since ceased to notice the skewy cabinet doors. Like the non-functional dishwasher, or the stack of Stuff on the sitting-kitchen table or the mess atop the dryer, the doors had faded into the background of my life. They had become wallpaper.

A person comes to take certain things for granted. Queen Victoria, at the theatre, sat down without looking behind her to make sure her chair was there; she knew it would be. It always had been, after all, and always would be. Wealth, if you've always had it, is simply there; you don't give it a second thought. But the same can be true of poverty; you can get so used to deprivation that you take it for granted. Not that it isn't a trial, but it becomes a customary trial.

The landscape of your life may be ugly, but it's still familiar, almost homey. It always surprises people that others get stuck in apparently awful situations--abusive relationships, horrible families, bad jobs, whatever. But the whatever the dysfunction is, it can become so much a part of life that it feels normal. When infant mortality was high, losing a baby was a normal part of life, not that you didn't grieve, but there wasn't the sort of shock and sense of outrage that we now feel when a child dies. We, on the other hand, take it for granted that we'll raise the overwhelming majority of the children we bear. That, to us, is wallpaper.

The pattern of the wallpaper can be handsome or ugly. I'd gotten so used to my skewy cabinet doors that I forgot how ugly they were; but I also take for granted certain privileges, having access to music, for example, until my little stereo had to spend a week in the shop, and then I missed it sorely.

We take some sins for granted so thoroughly that it doesn't occur to us to question them: when did it last occur to you that letting your car idle unnecessarily is contributing to global warming? (True.) But we take good for granted too: the beauty of the earth, the love that sustains and upholds us, God's sweet grace, our families, our own good qualities. We ignore so much that should gladden or appall our eyes, and this is simply human nature.

Maybe Lent is a good time to take our minds off our regularly scheduled sins--the untidyness of my house, for example, which is Always Before Me--and take a closer look at whatever it is we take for granted about our lives. Maybe it's a time for realism, which means some penitence, but also some sober rethinking of our unexamined assumptions about life--our personal maps of the Known Universe. Maybe, if we're realistic, it's a time for very mixed feelings: sorrow over our own failings, of course, but also surprise, and new curiosity, and more than a little gratitude and wonder.

Above all, Lent is a time to think about Stuff. All sorts of stuff, good and bad--everything we don't examine during the other seasons of the year. Christ spent time in the desert, apart. Being apart, in the non-literal sense of standing back and *looking*, is an excellent way for a person to cast a newly sharpened, narrowed eye over what's up on a person's spiritual walls, whether for good or ill..

For God's Word came not to settle us down in our old familiar patterns, but to shake and stir us into newness of life--and that means dumping some stuff, reassessing a great deal, re-setting expectations and priorities, and reconsidering much that we take as a given.

Now that I think of it, maybe I could put a shelf in next to the dryer, for the stuff that now sits on top of it.. wouldn't take long. Wonder why I never thought of it before.