When I was a little girl, one of my favorite things to do was to rearrange the furniture in my bedroom. Even as a child, I could be found in my room on a random Saturday scooting my bed and dresser from one spot to another until my bedroom configuration was just right. Then, at the end of a long day filled with furniture and finishing touches, I would crawl into my newly-positioned bed with a huge smile on my face and the deep satisfaction that all was well in my little room.
Not much has changed since then. I still can be found scooting furniture from one spot to another and I still find deep fulfillment in creating beautiful spaces that we get to enjoy and share with others. And over the years, I have come to realize that there is something good and incredibly hopeful about creating a home.
Home isn’t something that just happens. It is something we learn to faithfully cultivate. When we create spaces, we begin to see with hopeful eyes the beauty in a place others may not have noticed yet—the latent potential and glimmers of possibilities that others may have disregarded—and we get to transform the spaces we inhabit into places of beauty, rest and redemption.
In these spaces where everyday life unfolds, we get to live out our faith in radically ordinary ways, as we learn what it looks like to love and serve the Lord and the strangers, neighbors, family and friends he has placed in our lives.
It is beautiful. And it is good.
Yet far too often I look at the world around us and see how easily this good gift of home can become a place of bondage, rather than beauty, of burdens, rather than rest, or of self-glorification, rather than redemption. We take the good gifts God has given us to steward, and begin to see them as our aim and the end all be all instead of the good Giver himself. We turn his good way of relating to those gifts into a path of perfectionism that can never be achieved.
So we strive. We buy. We consume, thinking that this home improvement, this styling trend, this purchase, this project will finally be the one that satisfies our deep hunger for wholeness—for all to be well.
Our homes become an obsession, rather than an expression of God’s deeper work of redemption in and through our lives. And it leaves us longing for more.
It’s here in the longing that Christ extends His gracious invitation to us—the same invitation he extended to the crowd gathered around him on a mountainside:
People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met. (Matthew 6:32-33, MSG)
Or in other words: Seek him and his kingdom first.
Now you may be thinking, “Ok great, Laura. Thanks for the over-simplification and cliché. But how the heck do we actually apply that to our lives, let alone to how we create our homes?“
Hear me out. Seeking him first doesn’t mean we care less about our homes. It means we learn to love them in their proper place. It means we learn to receive them as gifts rather than grasping for them as gods. It means allowing Christ to shape not only what we create, but why we create it.
What might this look like in practice?
1. Begin by abiding
I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:5, NIV)
First, we learn to abide in him and invite him into every part of our lives, including our desire to create a home. From that place, how we create our home becomes a conversation. Before beginning another project or adding another item to our cart, we learn to pause and come to him asking “Am I okay here? Do I need to adjust my focus or my priorities? Lord, am I trying to find in this project something only you can give me?”
An important note on this is that it really doesn’t have anything to do with how much we spend or don’t spend. It’s a posture of the heart—what we truly desire. It’s about keeping our eyes on him and seeking his kingdom above all else. Abiding in him helps to reorder our desires and align them with his so that what we are working towards is actually fruitful and a blessing to both us and the world around us.
2. Create with the end in mind
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:16-18, NIV)
When our desires are reordered, we begin to see our homes differently and we learn to create with the end in mind, realizing that our homes, our projects, all that we are working on is not the end in of itself. It is simply a milestone along this journey of life as we move toward an eternal, lasting and enduring Kingdom. What we do now, in the present matters, but it is in service of a larger vision of the Kingdom of God and being the type of people who can steward it well. Every room we paint teaches things like patience. Every meal we prepare becomes an opportunity to serve. Every garden reminds us to wait, to trust, and to cultivate what we cannot force to grow. These things matter, not because they will last forever, but because they are preparing us for the Kingdom that will.
3. Hold with open hands
Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father… (James 1:17, NIV)
Seeing our homes within God’s larger story also changes how tightly we cling to them. When we create with the end in mind, we learn to hold our homes with open hands. We ask: if this home were gone tomorrow, would Christ still be enough? We come to realize that this home, as wonderful as it is, is not our everything. It is not our identity. It is not our ultimate security. It is a gift that God has chosen to given us in this season to steward and it is not ours to hold on to forever.
4. Give freely
Freely you have received; freely give. (Matthew 10:8, NIV)
Which leads me to this last thought: it’s very simply not about us. When we learn to see our homes through Kingdom eyes, to hold them with open hands, our response to God’s good gifts is radical generosity. God has blessed us to be a blessing to those around us. He has shown us what radical generosity ultimately looks like through the gift of his Son and as we have freely received, we are invited and called to freely give. As Jim Elliot once said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
How we live this out will look different for each one of us. But my prayer for us is this: may our homes point beyond themselves. May they be places where Christ is honored and his presence is made known, where ordinary moments become acts of worship, and where family, friends, neighbors and strangers all catch a glimpse of the goodness of God. May we faithfully cultivate the homes he has entrusted to us, not as ends in themselves, but as reflections of His Kingdom, pointing to the One in whom it is truly well.
This Darling Adventure 