I’m so grateful that it has taken time to build our home. During the long process of waiting on finances, God has been working in us a new dream. One that has far more eternal impact than bricks and mortar.
While I still love the forever home that we are in the process of constructing, it doesn’t hold me in its grip. It will always be a place for our family and friends to flourish, to gather and celebrate, to live life to the full, but it won’t consume me.
This is a huge shift as my whole life has been about interiors, design and ‘stuff’.
I am more excited about the charity we have established and the not for profit store we are going to be opening in our city!
When I realised that a teacher in Uganda lives on $2.60 a day, a street child in Cambodia relies on sifting through rubbish on the city dump to find food, and that there are 147 million orphans worldwide as I type this, it changes the type of ‘stuff’ I want to put my effort into.
I was searching online yesterday for some exterior lights for the verandahs of our home. I saw some fantastic, exactly what I had been looking for lights and sent off an email to the company.
That rusty look just gets me every time!…Until I got the reply email, where each light is over $600 trade!!
How can I think about buying 10 x $600 lights for a house, when little children’s ‘lights’ go out every day for lack of food?
So far, the build has been pretty economical – what we have spent to date is far less than most people, because as a builder the man hours are $0, and materials can be bought cheaper.
My spirit will always be nourished by beautiful things, it’s how we were created. But beauty needn’t be expensive…
“When you have only two pennies left in the world,
buy a loaf of bread with one,
and a lily with the other.”
{Chinese Proverb}
