COUCHED IN MYSTERY By Rhonda Rhea

Boy, do we need a new sofa. There are several reasons why, the first being that we're a wrestle-on-the- sofa kind of family. It's like WWF on a smaller, sofa-sized scale. My teen boys are 6-footers so it was only a few months of wrestling before the couch lost a round or two and started making a loud popping sound every time we sit on it. Hey, if I'd wanted a crunchy couch I would've left the kids' potato chips in there, thank you very much. It's like a cereal sofa with all that snap, crackle, popping. I sat down the other day and I was just sure I'd snapped my spine. Scary.

Even more scary is the second reason we need a new sofa. With five kids, I shudder to think of all the fermenting Pepsi, pizza sauce, Ramen residue and old milk in there (although the milk is more likely closer to cottage cheese by now). It's full of toxic liquid teenager solution. I don't even want to know what kind of juices I'm sitting on. Whatever is in there, it's "couched" in mystery. Come to think of it, maybe it's good that the sofa makes that popping sound. It's probably drowning out the "squish." Any way you look at it, I've done a sofa-check and it's time to burn this thing. Time to put it to death. I have to do a life-check regularly, too, to make sure I get rid of anything squishy. Sitting on sin? That's worse than sitting on a fermenting sofa.

Ephesians 2:1-7 says, "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions- -it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus" (NIV). How wonderfully amazing that because of the love of God, we can be forgiven--cleaned up. It's better than the newest, cleanest, top-of-the-line designer couch. Maybe not so much a couch as a "love seat." As for my crackly sofa, I'm off to burn it. I just hope that with all those teenage chemicals in there it's not too flammable. I could lose my eyebrows over this thing.