God's Dream Home

GOD’S DREAM HOME

When I’m out shopping for clothing or for home décor, or for anything really, I almost never buy what I really want because what I really want doesn’t “go with” the things I already own. So, maybe there’s a chair that I’m drawn to – a charmingly eccentric and wonderfully comfortable chair. It’s as if I designed this chair in a dream and now here it is in real life, the perfect chair for me. But I don’t buy it because the color and style doesn’t “go with” anything in any room of my home or because I know that other people whose opinions I care about will not like the chair. 

So, I keep shopping and eventually I find a chair that goes with the style and color of the furnishings in my house.  It’s an ok chair.  Everyone else will really like it. I buy the chair and take it home and find that I was absolutely right!  It blends in seamlessly with everything I already have; everything that I picked in some other phase of life, all the stuff I have that make others feel comfortable.  Every time I walk by that chair, I think of my dream chair and how it would not have fit, how it would have stood out, demanding attention, how it would have clashed and made people blink and wonder about my taste, and maybe my sanity.

But how I would have loved that chair.

I have gone through this same process with a lot of choices in my life – with most of them, in fact.  I base my choices of what’s next for me on what has gone before.  Will this new choice go with my image?  Will it go with the reputation I worked so hard to build?  Will all the people in my life be comfortable with it, approve of it, applaud it?

I live in a comfortable, tasteful, polished and respectable life that I have furnished with things I was drawn to at another stage of life and things I thought other people would choose if they were me.  And it occurred to me one day, what if everyone does this?  What if we all base our choices today on our past choices or on what other people would choose if they were us? And now when I walk into other people’s houses, I wonder about all the dream rooms in their minds, and I think about how I would love to meet the person who occupies those rooms, but probably never will.

And now I’m going to make this post about God, because for me, everything is about God, or Universal Consciousness, or Spirit, or whatever you want to call it. For me, the elderly Pitt Bull who is at this moment, peeing on my Azaela bush, is just as sacred as any passage of the Bible.   

So just imagine this for a minute…

Just imagine that the Spirit of God is a designer, and that God drew up a particular plan for a particular home that God wanted to live in.  And imagine that the home was in you. God’s home was your life.  It would be different than any other home ever furnished. It might be a small cottage, or it might be a magnificent castle, but whatever it was, it would be a one-of-a-kind masterpiece of a place.  And then, when God was finished with God’s plans, God rolled them up and tucked them into your DNA.

And at the beginning, you did furnish this home based on the God plan.  You chose the designs that you were drawn to and the shapes and colors that attracted you, and the patterns that fascinated you and the textures that comforted you.  You chose the life experiences and people and activities you were curious about and passionate about.

But then, before this home of God was even half furnished, other decorators started to complain that the home for God that you were furnishing was not what they liked, not what they would choose. Who would ever want to live in this weird ass home, they asked you. And you looked around and you could see that they were right.  Your home for God was nothing like the homes for God that other people were designing, which were based on other people’s homes, which were based on other people’s homes, and so on and so forth all the way back to the Garden of Eden which was the very first home design. It was where Adam and Eve lived, naked as Jaybirds, without slipcovers or Febreeze. And God was present and visible in that home to Adam and Eve until the day they poisoned themselves with the idea that all the creatures God made GOOD might not be GOOD ENOUGH.  Then they started with the hiding and covering up.  They started with the bras and undershirts and the slipcovers and Febreeze and now, here we are, covering up who we really are, resisting what we really desire, desperately trying to please each other while God is wandering around homeless.

So, here’s what I’m thinking – I’m thinking that the next time I approach a choice in life, I should pay close attention to my longings, and my passions, and my interests and my dreams, because those are the passions and interests and longings and dreams that God encoded into my DNA.

And I think that the next time I go out shopping and I fall in love with a chair, I should buy it, because that’s probably the chair God wants to sit in.