While Emerald happily played with my button collection and a couple of muffin tins, I studied something else in the mix: my husband’s shirt stays.

Nate liked his business shirts starched till they were almost stiff. When we were first married and he was still a law school student, washing and ironing the all-cotton shirts of that era wasn’t high on his agenda. So he wore a professionally laundered/starched shirt every day. When I hugged him, he crinkled.

Gradually I convinced him to let me do his laundry, and a bit of spray starch with an iron seemed to work just as well. Most of his shirts were button-down at the collar. Those tiny little buttons, almost too small for man-sized fingers, kept collars perfectly straight. But eventually cotton button-downs morphed into button-free collars on shirts made of soft perma-press fabric. That’s when the stays came in.

Each collar corner had a tiny narrow pocket sewn into it, just big enough for a plastic stay. Those collar points would then stay perfectly flat and stiff…. without any starch.

Over the years I found scores of these stays in the bottom of my wash machine after Nate or I would forget to remove them before washing his shirts. That, apparently, was why they were made of indestructible plastic.

As I fingered those stays today I thought about how nice it would be if we had something like body-stays to help us stand up straight and defy gravity’s tug over years of time. Even better than that, though, would be spiritual stays.

If we had those, there’d be no such thing as backsliding in our faith or losing our first-love enthusiasm for the Lord. We’d never feel blue over a discouraging situation, because nothing could “wrinkle” our bright hope in Christ. In other words, our spiritual stays would work to keep our faith from “wilting,” no matter what was going on around us.

Of course if we consulted God about this, asking for the equivalent of spiritual stays, he’d probably say, “You already have the one spiritual stay you need, the one I gave you years ago. It’s actually a collection of stays that far surpasses even the biggest collection of buttons.

“They come in the form of my words, and they’re kept not in a baggie with buttons but in the safety of the Bible. If you tuck several of them into each of your days, responding to life according to what they say, your faith will never wrinkle or wilt. And if you’re willing to ‘stay’ with Me in that way, I’ll always ‘stay’ with you.”

 “If you do not stand firm in your faith, you will not stand at all.” (Isaiah 7:9)