I like pretty things. I love spending time on pinterest just looking and pinning and dreaming. I have over 3300 pins. All pinned with a hope of crafting or purchasing. Here’s the problem, I hate spending money. Like haaaaate. I will stand in front of the dollar section of Target and have a mental battle to justify a single dollar purchase. Don’t even get me started on clothes. I’m so thankful that my sister loves clothes and graciously passes her hand me downs to me. That and my husband will occasionally force me to look through the clothing sections.
But what I love the most is décor. And I can never justify buying something that I alone think is pretty that is intended for everybody in the house to enjoy. Either I’ll think of something else we could use that money for, like groceries, or I assume my husband will wonder why I’m spending hard earned money on trinkets.
Wanna know what he asked me a couple weeks ago?
“Why don’t you ever decorate the house?”
Can you say bad communication? I just sat back and assumed and here he is wondering what’s wrong with me. Here’s why all that came about…
As we were preparing the house to sell we had a budget. My job was to make the house sell worthy. I went crazy y’all. I went to Michael’s, Ikea, Target, etc. We hired painters, had new carpet put in, had the wood floors refinished and even hired someone to landscape our front garden beds {brown thumbs here}.
I’m betting you can guess what happened next. Reality sunk in deep and I realized that what I wanted, all the beauty in the house that I had dreamed about, it was sold to the new buyers. They got my paint, floors, garden beds and curtains. It was the curtains that broke me. Come on, curtains are expensive. I’m not even kidding, I broke down and cried my eyes out.
It had nothing to do with the curtains. It had everything to do with finally getting the courage to get something pretty and having my realtor give them away as a barter without our knowing.
I cried in front of my husband. I cried in front of the realtor. It was bad.
My husband took my face in his hands as I cried out.
“Why?? Why do I always do nice things for other people and never for my own family??” I wept.
He lifted my chin.
“This isn’t for them,” he said, “you’re doing this because He wants us to go.”
He wants us to go
You see, my friends, it was never about me. Where I saw beauty in curtains is nothing compared to the beauty of what Yahweh has prepared for us. If I keep my mind focused on the here and now then I never see past the curtains through the panes of glass to the awaiting land of milk and honey.
There’s going to be distractions. For us it was clear that the enemy was using every tactic to discourage us from moving. And this happened from years ago. One year when we were looking to move to North Carolina our car broke down on the highway. At the moment we said, “God clearly does not want us to move to North Carolina.”
A year later we went to a wedding in Charleston, South Carolina and we both said we would NEVER move to South Carolina.
A year later we moved to South Carolina and we were on the border so my husband worked in North Carolina.
When my husband began working with Food for the Hungry I kept saying, “we should move to Nashville since they have an office there.”
“No, they’d never let me move there. My job isn’t needed there.”
Aaaaaaand, here we are in Tennessee.
When we think we know best God reminds us that He knows better. He sees the entire picture. He sees past the curtains. He sees past the minute distractions that we get enveloped in.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to decorate my house. Even more so now that I finally have communicated with my husband and we both want beautiful surroundings. That’s a part of hospitality, right? But I need to hold my hand loosely. We need to be ready and willing when He asks us to give for Him again.
Blessings!
