When the Gospel Transforms Interiors
The same tidings of comfort and joy that give us loving eyes in December can spill out into our rooms, sticking around long after the holiday decorations have been put away.
Here in the “cul-de-sac”, people come and find themselves wanting to just sit a spell. The draw (we are told) is real. The beauty (we are told) makes our homes a favorite destination. This is because where there is love, there is going to be artful beauty instead of just well-designed rooms by rote.
The best beauty is born out of constraints. When a lover takes what Love has given, and creatively arranges it in ways that make the life of the people of that home flow unhindered, there is great comfort. The Gospel allows there to be a certain deference in that home. The people in it defer to one another. And that deference releases joy, because no one is hung up on herself.
Comfort and Joy.
The Gospel is the ultimate home design philosophy.
It is Christmas, and I find myself drawn to all the beautiful images of all the beautiful homes. Many of my friends literally have magazine-worthy homes.
As in - their homes are already in more than one magazine.
Having both admired these rooms in pictures and been inside many of them in person, it can be easy for someone as beauty-inspired and visually-driven as I am, to fall into the trap of comparison.
This is when the gospel has profound impact on my interior design philosophy! The Good News impacts my interior spiritual world, and it impacts the interiors of my physical world.
The grace of God literally decorates my house, and I don’t mean Scripture on the walls.
See, the gospel keeps me in the love of God. Part of my responsibility as a literal, embodied homemaker is to have loving eyes - eyes that can look my own world back into grace. Yes, so many of my dearest friends’ homes are ab.sol.ute.ly gorgeous . Yes, so many of my friends either could be (or are!) interior designers.
You won't find that level of expertise on this blog, on my IG feed, or inside my home. But I hope you will find beauty, nonetheless. What I hope you do find on my social media are images that say "She finds the art in her real life. She takes what she has been given, and creates her own context for it."
I often think the ONLY difference between “art” and ordinary, between a shared meal or "just food", between beauty and ashes, is context. In my case, my context is the impact of grace. Life with Christ is a way of seeing that has to be communicated. It is a way of seeing that comes out in all areas. My perspective shows up in my paintings, my personal style, and the rooms of my home
A truly lovely home, a home that is an actual haven and more than just a well designed space, is the simple presence (or absence) of a loving eye.
Turn a small tract house in a cul-de-sac in a declining neighborhood over to a lover, and she will, for all its ordinariness, create art out of the life she lives there. After all, that marvelous collection of second-hand copper pots, the chairs, tables, and potted plants exist here purely but for one reason: for the good of a family, because a lover has turned her gaze upon it. She's taken time to cherish and place every bit of it, making it serve her family. And she has grace-eyes for the souls that share it all with her.
2020 has sent us all, one way or another, back home.
And we can make much of little, or little of much. It’s cliche, but some cliches are deeply true: we will never have everything we want, but we can want everything we have.
I remain convinced that fresh insight into the grace of God has enabled me to see breathtaking beauty in seemingly ordinary objects and people and moments in time.
It has inspired my daughters and I to make art, tend gardens, build a chicken coop and fill it with chickens, plant flowers and give away more bouquets than can be counted. Seriously, the gospel has done all that in us! It has planted deep inside our spirit a fierce fight to “love what is ours”.
No, really. We love what is our own.
Even though what is our own is by most standards “not much”.
The result? God and all my neighbors as my witness, people have come, are coming, and will come from all over the world just to spend a little time here in this cul-de-sac. And when they come, they don’t want to leave.
Just this week, a police car quietly drove down our street, all the way to the end, circled around and stopped. In a neighborhood like ours, you kind of have to wonder if all is well. Know what I mean?
My son in law Justin went to ask him if we should lock our doors and hide the kids. Come to find out, he said that he felt peaceful in our cul-de-sac. He couldn’t quite put into words why he felt so restful in this place, and not any of the other streets around here. He chalked it up to the snow that had just begun to fall.
That snow was falling everywhere. Yet he took his break smack-dab in front of our collective Gospel-homes. He rested and did some paperwork in the shelter of our three houses; houses that face each other both literally, and metaphorically. Their front doors all face each other around the pavement circle, and inside our homes, all the hearts face one another in vulnerable love.
The Gospel has made our lives, and even our homes, winsome and lovely. To us. To us. We actually do love what is ours the best. The grace of God transforms “enough” into a feast.
We don’t live in the country, where a little bit of grit has better context. We don’t live in a part of the city, where a little surrounding scruff can be urban and hip. We live in a suburban cul-de-sac just inside city limits. We are a stone’s throw from a bowling alley, a smoke shop, and a burner cell phone store. We can’t make it anything but what it is. The context is the context.
We would happily volunteer to entertain royalty here, without shame.
