My Riches Are Real
The only way to have a friend is to be one. Be one relentlessly.
Love appropriately (which simply means respecting boundaries, cherishing quirks, managing/eliminating expectations) and unconditionally.
Most of all, think well of your friend.
Your entire experience of that relationship equals the sum total of your thoughts about the person. Seriously, it isn’t even your memories together, it is not what she said or what she did. The quality of your relationship to anyone equals the quality of the thoughts you choose to think about them. Your experience of your friend is the story you have told yourself about her.
Why choose a story that devalues the friendship? Why choose a narrative that makes you feel offended (you did know that you always offend yourself, right…no one can offend you, if you don’t offend you with what you decide to believe) Why let love die, when you can choose a story that keeps love kindled.
A brief but vital aside: I’m talking about when a relationship is under any kind of normal circumstances. And “normal” has a wide, wide range. Only very extenuating circumstances create the exception, not the fact that your friend never calls you. Addiction, moral or ethical failure that goes on without repentance, unmanaged narcissism, flagrant weirdness, or when someone relentlessly devalues YOU in their thinking - all these change the landscape. Those things mean that all bets are off.
But under any kind of normal circumstances, we choose how we think about someone. We choose what we believe about them.
Historically, this has been an area of God-given strength for me. My tendency is to tell myself the story that will make me love you.
My family and husband can bear witness to the fact that I try very hard to be careful about how I even THINK about others. The other sad thing they can also bear witness to is that this is not always returned. (Pssssst: it’s okay. That, in my opinion, is a spot-on sorting mechanism.)
Did you know that your relationship to me is EXACTLY the sum total of the thoughts towards me that you have entertained? Your thoughts will dictate your experience of me.
Have you ever had your care or concern or good intentions seemingly “bounce off” of the person you were trying to encourage? This is why. They literally do not feel your love. They absolutely can’t see the small gestures that normally are noticed and cherished. When someone is determined to choose a story that offends them, nothing you can do will change the perception.
Every single one of us chooses our lenses through which we see. Every single one of us chooses how we hear - not just what we hear, but how we hear it! This is why Jesus said, “Be careful how you hear…” (Luke 8:18). Another word for this combination of how we see and how we hear is our “perception”.
I will never forget someone saying to my husband (who was attempting to restore the relationship, while not compromising his own integrity within himself - so often, a leader has to let go of a relationship with “the one” when hanging onto it means possible harm to “the many”) this person said, “Well, Tim, you always said that someone’s perception is their reality. My perception is my reality.”
This person thought they had my husband “dead to rights”. But what they did not know that we had long ago been taught by a seasoned leader, that when someone begins to use your own words against you, they are likely committed to their offense. It’s what the teachers of the law did to Jesus - no pastor is the exception, if Jesus was not the exception. (Matt. 26:61)
In that moment, the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, “So be it.” And a great weeping came over my spirit for them. How horrible, to be limited to your perception of reality.
I have no control over your perceptions. They will be your reality because your mind will always find proof for what you are thinking.
But (here’s the good part) I have exquisitely beautiful authority over my perceptions. I can choose what I think about you.
The goal: No one will believe better about you than me. They might believe AS I do, but they won’t believe sweeter or better. I see in you such gifts and strengths and possibility.
You’d have to prove me wrong - and trust me, a handful have done that. However, they’ve had to go out of their way.
But having come all the way out of a season of separating the precious from the worthless (Jeremiah’s words in scripture), and finding out who was going to prove me wrong, I can feel my heart coming full circle.
Still believing the very best, most beautiful things concerning the ones God has placed in my sphere. You should be someone who feels so blessed to be one of those women! That’s my goal in this life of tending middle friendships. Riches truly do not consist of the things we have or in our savings accounts, but in the friendships we possess.
If I’ve been thinking about my friend in ways that lower her value, if I have given voice to those thoughts to anyone else - well, then I really do not deserve that friend in the first place.
Whatever it is that she did or did not do, I have chosen how I will think about her, if I have made circumstances mean something devaluing. I am the one who chose a response that isn’t friendship at all.
The only option I have is to fix it fast (life is short) or lose something of unfathomable value: a clear conscience where it concerns a friend, and thus I have lost the friendship.
That’s poverty.
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.
