Nope. On camera, you are darling, witty, patient. Your children are not getting on your last blessed nerve while they “help paint” (make it stop). You haven’t been able to feel your frozen feet for twenty-three straight days, but you are easygoing about it because you are precious. Your “OTFs” to camera (“on the flies,” which we sometimes called WTFs because we need a savior) are smiley, relaxed: “Today we hit a bit of a snag with the plumbing, but we’ve called in the experts and hope to be back on track in no time!” That is on camera; the cursing and despair is off. While mic’d, your husband never once yells, “You are acting like the Blair Witch!” and instead says, “We’ll figure it out, babe.” In other words, we filmed a fictional rom-com, and we hope you enjoyed our show.
I’ll tell you what we loved: our crew. We spent more time with our producers and camera guys during those few months than with our own flesh and blood. It was incredibly refreshing to be outside of church work and ministry in a completely new space with people we grew to adore. We ate lunch around the table together every single day, and our conversations ran the gamut from our sound tech saying, “God seems like a real ass” to our cameraman Christopher confessing, “I cried so hard during The Pursuit of Happyness I had to leave the theater.” We had so many raw and interesting and truthful discussions, but we mostly laughed every day, all day. They adored our kids, took fantastic care of us, showed up positive and hilarious daily, and I cried my ever-loving eyes out during our “wrap party” as I tried to tell them what they’d meant to our family.
And now we get to live in this quirky, charming, lovely old farmhouse, and it is everything we ever dreamed of. I’ve come to realize exactly what the show was: a gift. That’s it, plain and simple. It was a gift to our marriage, our season of life, and our family. It has since been the scene of incalculable memories, gatherings, parties, and get-togethers. We’ve hosted three hundred women who helped launch my last book, nearly four hundred partners in our nonprofit (The Legacy Collective), backyard concerts, crawfish boils, Hays High School Varsity soccer team dinners, “Dinner for 10” through our church, a dozen supper clubs, ten thousand football watch parties, Halloween bashes, Christmas mornings, New Year’s brunches, church partner classes, Little League football parties, friends’ birthdays, Sweet Sixteen celebrations. It has been a joy and delight to throw open the doors of our old house and welcome in our neighbors and friends, our church and family.
There is nothing more meaningful, life-giving, or lovely than home.
Dear one, may I say something? It is not shallow or empty or frivolous to create a beautiful space to live in. It’s not silly, not vainglorious, not a waste of time and energy. It doesn’t make you superficial nor slide you down the godly scale. We spend the majority of our hours in our homes with our people. Creating beauty and nurture under your roof with colors that soothe, art that inspires, furniture that invites, and textures that thrill is a wonderful use of your small space on the planet.
I do not mean this in a trite, cliché way in the slightest: How could we imagine that a God who created wildflowers and waterfalls and pine trees and hummingbirds and warm sand and mountain ranges and tulips thinks beauty is nonsense? He made a gorgeous, over-the-top earth wild with colors and textures and breathtaking landscapes. And He loved it. He said it was good, so good. He made it for our pleasure as a testament to His character. He created a sensual, aesthetic, jaw-dropping world and asked us to enjoy it. If God decided to make his whole earth pretty, we can choose to make our little homes pretty without tension, guilt, or shame.
That’s when the fun starts! Design and decorating, making a house a home; this is supposed to be invigorating, not paralyzing. Let’s be very honest: we are not curing cancer here. As much as we shouldn’t undervalue beauty, we shouldn’t overthink it either. If your living room wall has the same five paint sample patches you “tested” there four years ago, you may be taking this too seriously. This is my motto when it comes to creating lovely spaces:
It’s just paint.
I use that for all things. “It’s just paint” also means: it’s just a stain, it’s just a finish, it’s just a bedspread, it’s just a print, it’s just a couch, it’s just a table, it’s just an old dresser, it’s just tile, it’s just hardware. Seriously, the consequences here are negligible. Don’t like the pulls you chose for your cabinets? Take them off and return them. There, I solved it. There is no such thing as a design emergency. There is no such thing as a decorating catastrophe. It’s just paint.
Once you lift the shroud of gravity, creating a beautiful home is fun. Like my friend Myquillyn Smith says in her book The Nesting Place, “It doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful.” Find colors and styles that make you feel alive and inspired and at home, and pull the trigger. Start small, start anywhere, start with one room, one corner, one piece. You want to try a funky feature wall? Grab a hammer. Want to give an old dresser a good sanding and a fresh coat of turquoise paint? Get a brush. Do your friends love neutral colors but you love red? “Currant Red” by Benjamin Moore will make your heart sing. If not a whole wall, an old chair, a console, a chandelier, a coffee table. It’s just paint.
Go with what you love, not necessarily what you see on design shows or in your neighbor’s house. Pay attention to what grabs your eye and what you are consistently drawn toward. My style is random and possibly invented: I favor a bit of “old barn” crossbred with some industrial elements, super mismatched furniture, cluttered oversized wall features, and enough color to make Joanna Gaines cry all the tears in Waco. I prefer mostly old things but some new, and I like everything to feel cozy, overstuffed, textured, warm. I want to tuck my friends into my comfy too-big-for-the-room sectional with mugs of coffee and cover their laps with crocheted blankets while I play Johnny Cash on my old record player. Somehow that sentence explains my design style.
You do you here. There are no rules. I used to believe there were, that you could pick only one style, one direction, and all the ancillary design elements were in subjugation. I thought vibrant could never pair with neutral, cottage could never mix with contemporary, and if it wouldn’t be professionally grouped in a furniture store, it was not allowed.