Daniel and I have been putting our heads together for ideas to turn our home into a retreat home. Like anything worth having, it requires planning, sacrifice, and obedience to carry through. When we first married and I moved in, we had so much junk between the two of us. It didn’t take us long to realize that for us to make it a functional space, most of our personal possessions had to be purged. Something had to give.
Turning a house into a home is a process. It took us so much longer to make the inside of our home reflective of our new life together than it took to clear out the exterior (the part people tend to notice the most.) We learned and are still learning that growing together starts from the inside out. We had petty arguments, we cried, and most importantly, we faced each other’s fears together. Over time, it gets easier because all the stuff that needed to be dug up had already began to turn and was dealt with. In a way, facing each other’s fears and speaking truth cleared the ground for better things to be built on. There’s a part of me still kicking and screaming. Marriage is such a new concept.
Yesterday as I tilled our hard soil to make room for a garden, I was reminded of a song lyric from the band Gungor that goes:
Could all that is lost ever be found?
Could a garden come up from this ground at all….?
Oh, you make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us
Like making a house a home, pursuing a person for relationship goes through the same process. May God meet us all half way when we give up this old ground for better things to be built on. May every relationship we pursue be pursued from the inside out.
-Stef (The kicking and screaming Negoon)
negooning 