Once when we were in the throes of a home remodel, our contractor asked us about radiant heating. Would we like it placed in the bathroom floor, he wondered, knowing that we were having new tile installed and that tile can be toe-curlingly cold on winter mornings.
But we laughed. We’d been bathing in a cast-iron, claw-foot tub in an unheated, uninsulated bathroom—a back porch, really, that had been walled in when some long-ago owners had tacked indoor plumbing onto the back of the house and torn down the outhouse. A self-heating floor felt extravagant beyond reason. We were just happy to have insulated walls and a shower.
So we dropped the conversation and moved on—but our contractor didn’t. Weeks later my husband was standing in the freshly framed skeleton of our new bathroom when he noticed an electrical box in an odd place and asked our contractor about it.
“I wasn’t going to tell you this yet,” the contractor said, and then confessed that he’d gone ahead and installed the radiant heating anyway, at no cost to us. As a gift. “You’ll be glad for it when it gets cold,” he said.
When my husband told me this later that day, I put my head down on the table and cried. Everything made me cry back then—we’d been moved out of our house for two months for this project; I was homeschooling our girls on the go; and in the midst of this, while we were living out of plastic totes and suitcases, our church dissolved. I was beyond tired, and this kindness felt like more than I could comprehend. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I cried.
Because of course he was right: every winter there comes a day when the temperature drops and our normally mild winters take on an edge we’re never prepared for. Moisture freezes around the inside of our window frames, and our complete lack of snow gear is exposed (again). The cold trapped in the crawlspace beneath our house seeps up through our kitchen floor, so that if you stand too long in one place you can almost feel the circulation slow in your feet.
On those days, I now get to stand on the softly warm bathroom floor (next to the cold-shocked cats, who sit with eyes closed and tails tucked tight around their paws) and thank God for the kindness of our contractor, who gave us a gift we didn’t know we wanted, one that still feels so extravagant, as though I’d gone out to the driveway one Monday morning and found not our twenty-year-old minivan with moss growing in its seams but some sparkling new car with heated seats and one of those button ignitions. It’s so good it hardly seems to belong to us.
The kindness of that gesture made the grace of God something I could feel. It became a thing I could stand on and feel warm against my skin, a gift so lavish that it had never occurred to me to want it. Like the prodigal son hoping only for his father’s pardon and maybe for a job on the farm, I remember once hoping that God would just think I was okay. That maybe he wouldn’t turn me away at the door and that would be enough for me.
But instead God, like the prodigal son’s father, ran out to meet me and swept me inside, greeting me with such warmth and extravagance I was bewildered by it. I came asking for a pardon, and he ushered me straight to his table, seated me beside him, and called me his beloved daughter.
In Ephesians 2, Paul writes, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ . . . and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (vv. 4-6). Though we are broken sinners, prone to want all the wrong things, God pours out this great love upon us, offering not merely forgiveness but true and lasting life in him. The goodness of the gift seems wildly out of proportion to anything we might have hoped for.
That warm bathroom floor gives rise to these thoughts every winter—a tangible reminder of the grace I did not think to want, but that God gave me, in abundance, anyway. Those softly heated tiles serve as a common grace that the Lord uses again and again to assure me that he gives us more than we could ever ask for, and that it is his joy to do so.