House
Growing up, we didn’t know what living in a house was like. My family bounced around from apartment to apartment, making new friends, riding bikes on the sidewalks, and trying not to make too much noise at night because the walls were thin. We were a poor immigrant family, unstable, looking for cheap furniture in the classifieds, cleaning the carpets and hoping to get our deposits back. Then when I was in high school, my parents finally settled down into a nice, big house. 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, with a spacious backyard. We finally had a house to call our own.
We enter our house through the side door of the garage. It’s jam-packed with random stuff in there – we don’t like to throw things away; you might need it later, or someone else might need it! By the entrance is a random pile of shoes that you’ll have to step over to get inside. In the kitchen, there’s always a pot of something on the stove, and stacks of books on the floor in the living room. Our house looks American on the outside but on the inside, it’s more like my grandparents’ house in the Korean countryside. Come on in! It’ll always be a mess, but that also means you can put your feet up on the coffee table and make yourself at home.
But we’ve all grown up and moved away now. There’s nobody at the house anymore to take care of it. There was a time when the pool turned green because the filter broke. Recently, one of our neighbor’s house was broken into. So my parents toyed with the idea of putting the house on the market; the realtor came by to suggest a few remodeling projects. We put in a new wood floor, retiled the bathroom and foyer, and added some tulips to the front lawn. I walked into our house last week, and everything was so clean, so perfect, and so beautiful!
It was weird actually, to see our house like that. In a way, I was so proud to see our house so nicely redone, the grand piano polished, and the garage painted bright white. With all the random knickknacks taken out, only a few pieces of furniture and lamps were left. I could barely recognize it! Prospective buyers would come in and make comments about how lovely our house was, how we took such good care of it, and it made me feel proud. “Such a gorgeous back yard! I love the red brick swimming pool!” 
At the same time, it felt like a Hollywood exec was analyzing a family member, like it was just an object: “Nice butt! Muscular thighs! Woo, those eyes could make us some money!” It felt crass. Don’t look at our house like that! But what can I do? Our house was for sale.
I felt like yelling at them: ”This is our house!” It’s more than wood and brick. It’s birthday parties and barbecues and movie nights and sleepovers. This is the place my parents chose to raise us. This is where I had my 8th grade graduation party that disturbed my neighbors, where my sisters opened their Christmas presents, where we wrote our application essays and then opened our college acceptance letters, where we always came back to when we had vacations, when we graduated, or when we lost jobs. This was our house.
I know our house is beautiful, but it’s not beautiful because of the new wood floors or mature palm trees or the double French door. It’s not beautiful because it’s a contemporary one-story with a large lot in a desirable neighborhood, a “former model.” I knew how beautiful my house was, even when it wasn’t at its best. Even when it was messy, when we had ants, when the bathroom grew mold, when the doorknobs fell off, when the pool turned green – it was a beautiful house then too.
Last week, I said goodbye to our house for the last time. Nobody in our family really wants to sell it. We’re selling our house because nobody’s living in the area anymore; basically it’s a financial decision. But I was talking to my mom and she told me: “If it doesn’t sell, we’re just gonna keep it. We have so many happy memories there.”
This is our house. The outside world, they see it in terms of how it looks, what it can do. How many bathrooms it has, the square footage. They compare it to other similar houses. They put a price on it. It’s done up all pretty, its best foot forward. The realtor pumps up its ego. But to us, it’s just our house. It doesn’t need all that polish and preen. It doesn’t need to hide its blemishes, and act like something it’s not. It’s our house, and it will always be our house. Someone may come along and fall in love with our house for all its perfections. But part of me hopes that they’ll open up a cupboard and have the handle fall off, or spot a crack in a floorboard, or discover a leak in the ceiling, and call off their offer. Because this is our house. And no matter how much money they might offer, it’ll never be enough. 
Pastor Chris Choi is a graduate of Andrews Theological SDA Seminary. He has been a youth pastor of 3 Korean churches, and a missionary with the Adventist Frontier Missions in Laos.