But that is nonsense. If you like a bit of traditional, pops of rustic, and this one show-stopping midcentury modern piece, girl, do that thing. My favorite rooms are those that feel collected, not purchased all at once as a matchy, matchy package. That old lantern you found at a flea market and painted green? Hang that bad boy over your dining room table. That gorgeous vintage wallpaper you hung on one wall? I’ve fainted. A beautiful, textural cowhide rug under your super-modern coffee table? Yes, yes, yes, all day long. I painted some old deer horns turquoise and hung them inside an empty frame; my end tables are an old tree stump and an antique wire chicken basket, because I am the boss of my own house. The only rule is that you love it and it makes you happy when you look at it. That is the only guideline to obey.
None of this has to be expensive or fancy. There is no end to what you can create out of what you already have, what you thrift, what you reclaim, what you pull out of someone’s dumpster or off the side of the road (I have done these exact creepy things). Paint is cheap and changes everything from an end table to kitchen cabinets to an entire room. Make an informal co-op of fifteen friends and swap furniture; one girl’s tired headboard is another girl’s treasure. Craigslist has pages of stuff for free or next to nothing if you’ll just go haul it off. And don’t forget the age-old trick of simply rearranging a room, which will cost you nothing except some grunt work and between two and six arguments with your husband.
And let this be said: the biggest waste of nonrefundable years is closing your home to guests because it is not “pretty enough” (could also insert: big enough, new enough, clean enough, stylish enough, good enough). Let me address any possible objection about my ability to open my house with confidence because it was professionally renovated: Brandon and I have piled people into every home we’ve ever lived in, including apartments, duplexes, tract homes jammed with little kid crap, one home with no downstairs bathroom, one home with no insulation or dishwasher, two homes with no central air, and a dozen homes still stocked with our parents’ old furniture. If we delayed hospitality until we had a fully decorated home, we would have made our first friends two years ago. And even now, our old house is little and only a few folks can fit inside, so we basically spend all our friend time in the yard sitting in eleven-dollar chairs from Academy Sports + Outdoor.
Making your home pretty is nice, but making it nourishing is holy. Sister, paint that chair or hang that mirror, sure, but for the love, don’t wait until everything is done before putting on a pot of chili and inviting new friends over for football. Your neighbor wants to belong far more than she wants to be impressed. Some of my favorite memories involve walking into a girlfriend’s messy house, stepping over the mountain of shoes in her entryway, accepting a glass of Pinot in a plastic Mardi Gras cup, and grabbing a knife to help chop carrots. It isn’t the picture-perfect feature wall that makes me want to come back; it is the friendship, the warmth, the easy welcome, the laughter.
Home is the scene of so much love and happiness, community and pot roasts. It is where you invite people in and say, “You are so welcome in this place.” It is the reel our children will replay in memory the leather chair you read in, the farmhouse table you shared, the braided rug where you played eleventybillion games of Chutes and Ladders. It is your little corner of earth, entirely yours to make lovely. In a world increasingly dominated by fear and violence and isolation and loneliness, you can claim restoration under your small roof, where people are nurtured and loved and fed and embraced, where God reigns and hope is spoken, and where everything from the walls to your books to the conversations communicate the sentiment penned by Julian of Norwich in the fourteenth century:
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Women love always: when earth slips from them, they take refuge in heaven.1
— GEORGE SAND
CHAPTER 8
NO STRINGS ATTACHED
So I was the exact eighties Baptist youth group girl you think I was. If you didn’t grow up in Christian subculture back then, all I can say is that we teens graduated from True Love Waits, jammed to Petra (“a wholesome alternative to Def Leppard!”), aggressively highlighted our Life Application Bibles to impress our seatmates at church, and wore T-shirts that said: “If Bo don’t know Jesus, then Bo don’t know Diddley,” because appropriating current pop culture for Jesus Jukes seemed like an effective evangelical strategy, God bless and keep us.
I was oh so earnest. I carried my Bible to class after our youth camp pastor challenged us to, making the side-eye comment that “most of you will give up by October.” Well, listen, buddy, you don’t throw down the devotion gauntlet in a room full of teen Pharisees, then walk away casually. I’ll see your October and raise you a fifteen-pound study Bible displayed on my desk corner in May. How did I have any friends?
As a firm member of the purity and holiness culture, I harbored so much judgment toward my peers. I looked down my nose at all their shenanigans and was prepared at any time, like 1 Peter 3:15 instructed, as if I was defending my senior thesis, to “give an answer for this hope I professed” (while conveniently overlooking the next sentence: “But do this with gentleness and respect”). I didn’t know about that gentleness thing, but I did indeed have answers. Come at me, bro.
Looking back, trying to identify the motivation for my spiritual posture is tricky. What exactly compels a sixteen-year-old to isolate her classmates and peddle spiritual shame? Myriad cultural factors affected my generation of youth groupers, but it isn’t the whole truth to simply cast blame on our leaders and shrug off the weird stuff we all bought into. Nor is the chief culprit my type A personality with a heavy moral compass, although those qualities contributed.
I think I was afraid.
I was scared, first and foremost, of God. What a terrifying God I crafted back then: punitive, picky, arbitrary, angry. Holiness culture meant you were always one careless French kiss away from divine disapproval, because, like Jesus said, why buy the cow when you’re giving the milk away under the bleachers? I spent all my spiritual energy trying to stay on God’s Good Side, which I managed around twenty-three minutes a day. It was exhausting and scary and impossible. I was petrified of God. I don’t remember what I thought of Jesus. Jesus was the Side Guy.
I was also scared to love people. What if they were wrong? Wrong about what, you ask? Oh, just anything. Wrong living, wrong ideas, wrong faith, wrong crowd. If I loved someone “wrong,” then I was complicit. I was lending approval to wrongness, and that would banish me from God’s Good Side, obviously. Plus, I couldn’t bear the disapproval of my fellow youth group pals. Any wrongness infiltrating the camp was forbidden. As warned, it starts with one wrong friend, and the next thing you know, you are a backslidden Christian at a raucous teen beer party with no opportunity to rededicate your life until next summer’s youth camp.
I thought God’s plan for human beings essentially involved stringent rules to help us be really good (secured by guilt—His way of keeping order), suffering and sacrifice to keep us humble, clear moral boundaries to protect our “set apartness,” and a life of restraint until we could mercifully die and go to heaven. I assumed our main responsibility to other people was to point out their errors so they could repent and get with the plan.