Dwellings.

I have said it before and you will no doubt hear me say it again: I love houses.

This is the house I grew up in that my parents still live in:

This is the house I live in right now with the cutest little older couple. It’s their house:

Clearly I have been blessed with some pretty splendid dwellings.

Which is why I love houses.

I read my first Better Homes and Gardens when I was 8 and started drawing blueprints then.

I read more than 75 design books by the time I graduated high school. 75. Easy.

I have awakened in the middle of the night to sketch a blueprint of a house I saw in my dream.

I see people as if they are houses. What your personal style is when I see you on the sidewalk is very similar to what kind of house you live in; and I know how to decipher such things.

Don’t ask me how. It’s a gift. I don’t know either.

After I went to college I was designing less and less. Maybe because I all of the sudden had friends and spent my time with people rather than my sketch book (which for the Christian is usually a good idea). Whatever the cause was, I would go months without being inspired enough to jot something down. Not even just inspired enough to jot, but really just inspired at all. I would go months between when those gorgeous destinations in the brain would surface.

Then I noticed a change in my design process. All of the sudden I wasn’t seeing whole houses. I wasn’t necessarily even seeing whole rooms. Sometimes it would just be a desk or a bathroom floor, or even more shocking, sometimes I would just see the feeling you would get upon entering the room.

I know, I know.

I just said “see the feeling.”

I know.

I meant to say that.

I am glad you see how strange that is, but I have no other way to describe it.

What would also happen is that this feeling would stick in my head for days, weeks even. Sometimes I would start seeing more of the room, maybe more of the house. It was nagging, if I am being completely honest. To be haunted by a half-completed room is almost unbearable for a girl who won’t allow herself to take longer than a weekend when she is painting and all re-doing a room.

After a while, whether I had seen the rest of the house or not, the house would fade in my mind and I would no longer daydream about different widths of distressed wood floors.

But it wasn’t until I was journaling one day, I think, or maybe I was driving, but I could have also been doing dishes…..whatever I was doing it struck me like a bolt of lightning: That feeling I would see was whatever I was feeling for that specific season of life.

For instance, in that season of my life where all I wanted to do was crawl into a hole and never see most people again, you better believe I designed a stone house which sat in a foggy meadow surrounded by hundreds of acres of woods. Very untouchable. Or when I was resigning myself to the fact that some specific prayers about things that were current desires were NOT going to be transpiring, I designed a reclaimed barn, full of ins and outs. I called that house “The Good Things” house because the verse of that season was Psalm 103:2, 5. “Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits…who satisfies your desires with good things.” The truth of this verse is that he doesn’t always satisfy our desires with what we desire.

But he satisfies our desires with good things.

 And “no good thing does he withhold from those whose walk is blameless.” (Psalm 84:11)

Isn’t all of that interesting?

After I made these realizations it took me a step further. Not only was the feeling in the house the feeling of mine for that season of life, but the house held the specific comfort or strength that I needed HIM to be.

It would make perfect sense.

When I couldn’t take it anymore, I needed him to be stone walls. Or when I wasn’t getting what I thought would have been great for me, I needed him to show me that good things were better than my wants.

The last couple weeks an image has been milling about. I don’t see a whole lot of it, but I do know I will call it, “The House with Many Stairs.” Something to nestle in to.

I don’t know how he will fit in yet, but I know he will.

He always does. After all, Moses knew what he was talking about when he penned, “Lord, you have been our dwelling place.” Psalm 90:1