For Life & Home
I came across the interior designer, Jean Stoffer, a few years ago, and I loved her attentive, thoughtful restoration of historic houses. It was intriguing to me that she seemed to have “suddenly” appeared in the popular design world, yet she was in her 60’s. From her demeanor, it was clear that there was something deeper about her.
When her book Establishing Home arrived on Target’s shelves, I wanted to know more.
You’ll be inspired by her story if you’re holding loosely to a dream that hasn’t had much momentum because of your stage of life; if you’re chipping away at a project that hardly looks different from one day to the next; or if you’re feeling like slow might just mean never.
Jean consistently kept her values of God and family at the forefront of her business decisions, although it was agonizing to do so at times. After turning down a large-scale design opportunity, because it would have interfered with her family life, she writes this, “I was saying yes to growing my business slowly, one project at a time. Would I ever see an opportunity like that again? I had no idea.”
She believed that God would bring the next right opportunity within her priorities, but that didn’t make the choices obvious or easy along the way. Building her business at a pace that fit her family’s rhythm required faith, and in a culture where going viral is the goal, she models what it means to go step by step.
Check out Establishing Home
So Creepy
When we lived overseas, we learned the hard way that what makes you more susceptible to being car-jacked is if you’re sitting in your parked car in broad daylight. These facts leave you vulnerable:
The setting can be clearly evaluated in the sunlight: no one else is nearby.
You have keys to the vehicle you’re sitting in: the get-away will be easy.
You obviously don’t know better: the target is naive.
We couldn’t be totally immune to this threat ever happening to us again, but we could be on guard once we knew what made us vulnerable. And the same is true in our faith.
I’m creeped out by the words of 2 Timothy 3:5-7, “…Avoid such people. For among them are those that creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.”
After describing the type of people who creep into homes with false content, Paul points out three characteristics that weakened the women’s faith, making them easy targets for creepers. They were:
Carrying sin around. A burden as heavy as unconfessed sin leaves us without strength under the weight of its accusations. But repentance releases us (1 John 1:9).
Controlled by pleasure. Shackled to every whim and desire, we’re dragged one way and then the other in search of the next comfort. But the Spirit is stronger (Galatians 5:16).
Constantly learning, but never concluding. Content consumption is just spinning mental wheels if it doesn’t lead to or align with conclusive truth. But the Word is the source of real life-change (John 17:17).
Let’s not learn the hard way.
How to Make Yourself at Home
I’ve just followed God’s people through the book of Jeremiah into their tragic exile in Babylon. They had rejected God’s word and ignored His intervention, unwilling to change their ways, and so the consequences God had warned them about, finally came. Their deportation occurred in waves over the course of 17 years as hundreds or thousands of them at a time were taken captive (Jeremiah 52:28-30).
How they must have mourned all that they lost. A move itself is difficult enough emotionally and spiritually, but a move as divine judgment could have clothed them in sackcloth and ashes for the rest of their lives. They could have justifiably lived in their new location in a perpetual state of grief and disconnection, veiled in black and living in the past. But the most shocking thing about this discipline for their sin is God’s four-fold instruction to them regarding their new home:
“Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce.
Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.
But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile,
and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare, you will find your welfare.” Jeremiah 29:5-7
His message is essentially, Make yourself at home, and here’s how to do it.
At the end of this summer, Nate and I will celebrate 20 years of marriage. Over those years, we’ve lived in 4 states, 1 foreign country, and 9 apartments or houses along the way. That’s certainly not a record, but it’s more moves than I imagined for our family. Although none of our relocations happened for reasons like Judah’s all those millennia ago, the four-fold strategy God gave His people back then has served us well each time we’ve found ourselves in a new place:
Don’t live out of boxes. Unpack, decorate, garden, and live each day with a long-term mindset, rather than a temporary one. A temporary mindset is tempting, because it’s self-protection against the effort involved in starting over and the pain of eventual departure. But tears about leaving are better than cheers that you’re leaving.
Cultivate and celebrate new beginnings. Build deep enough relationships in the new place that you throw wedding showers and baby showers. God’s type of love multiplies, so with Him, you have enough love to keep giving.
Sarcasm about the new place or comparison to the last place delays your adjustment and denies God’s leadership. Instead, make it a better place because of your presence there with the experiences and insights you bring to it. Contribute to its good; don’t tear it down.
When you pray, include the geographical place where you live. Its peace will be your peace. Prayer softens our hearts, and that’s the change God is really after in His plan for our peace.
A Childlike Week
Especially on Mondays, I wake up with the weight of the week on my shoulders. It’s not that there’s always a crisis I’m bracing for up ahead, but that there are so many contexts I’m embracing up ahead. Home, work, church, friends, neighborhood…each one calls for attention, and I want to give it fully. But how to give myself to each one at the right time, in the right way, meeting the right need, is often what concerns me on a Monday morning.
Today as God met me, Ephesians 5:1 & 2 spoke the direction I need for this week:
“Therefore be imitators of God…”
In my home, imitate God
In my work, imitate God
In my church, imitate God
In my friendships, imitate God
In my neighborhood, imitate God
So this is supposed to be helpful?! You might say it sounds like an unreachable standard. Yet, it’s the next phrase that brings it down to scale:
“...as beloved children,”
Little children stick close, wide-eyed to their parents’ actions, words, and body language. They don’t overanalyze or second guess whether it was specifically in one context or another that their parents’ behavior applied, and so they indiscriminately imitate them. Blunders abound. Laughter abounds. Parents blush in embarrassment.
But God invites our eager, childlike imitation of Him, because His character and actions are applicable in every context, no filter necessary. It’s how Jesus lived on earth: “...whatever the Father does, the Son does also.” John 5:19.
When I stick close, wide-eyed to God Himself, what I’ll see in Him is love, as Paul continues in verse 2:
“and walk in love, just as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us…”
Giving up self in imitation of God applies in every context of my week. Surely, blunders will abound when I’m more childish than childlike, but my Father is with me every step to pick me back up and show me the way again. “For I the Lord your God hold your right hand. It is I who say to you, ‘fear not; I am the one who helps you.’” Isaiah 41:13
Gaps between the Maps
Every time I sit down at our dining table, my eyes look up at three framed maps of the places we lived prior to moving to Indiana.
They hang on the wall, representing deep friendships and good times and also detours. Each city had its construction zone, where the way forward wasn’t so clear, and roadblocks took us the long way around.
Even more confusing, though, is the two-inch wall space between each picture frame, reminding me of the transition period that somehow bridged one location to the next. Transitions in life feel like they’re off the grid, too blurry to be captured in an actual piece of art. They don’t have names because they’re in between.
The Israelites’ connection between Egypt and the Promised Land was forty gap years in a desert. When they finally crossed that bridge, Moses gave them this reminder in Deuteronomy 8:2, “Remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years…”
Years that could be described as wandering in the wilderness were still a season under God’s leadership, and recalling how He led them could equip their faith for their next destination. The verse goes on, pointing out two specific aspects of God’s leadership during that season of transition:
Teaching them humility
Testing their obedience
Humility and obedience don’t initially seem like indicators of God’s leadership, but they highlight how He brings transitions across our path for the purpose of leading our hearts. For those times when our feet have entered uncharted territory, we can ask how has He led my heart into humility and obedience? Evidence of His leadership in these areas is meant to strengthen our faith.
Faith is strengthened, not by envisioning an imaginary future, but by looking back on the past, recognizing that we have a God who led us the whole way, even across the gaps between the maps.