Beautiful Spaces

I think at its core, life is just as beautiful for each one of us as it was in the 90s. Yes, the way the world goes has presented us with a new series of challenges, but at the end of the day, I think that if we were to actually walk into each other's sacred spaces, we'd have the same reaction. 

It's so cool in here. This is so you. 

Because your life is beautiful. It is. It doesn't matter what it's thrown at you or what you've had to face or what you're facing now, your life has been cultivating its own little touches that are uniquely yours. And that makes it beautiful. 

I think that was part of the draw for me as a kid in the 90s. Yes, my space was distinctively my space, but it was neat to walk into someone else's space and see how they lived. To learn something about your friend that you didn't know before, that you never would have known if you hadn't seen their inner sanctum. 

And that's what's happening. We have these lives that are so curated online, these highlight reels, these picture-perfect sorts of things that we're trying to project, but our real stories are in our inner sanctums, in the places shaped in our lives by the living of it. Anyone who might dare to walk into such a space would find something more of us than they thought they knew, something more true about us than all of the curated spots in all the world could ever show them. 

That's where we're most connected to each other. 

The vacation pictures, the neat-and-tidy kids, the clean house, whatever else we're projecting, it does nothing but keep us apart. It does nothing but present the image that we're not living in the same world, you and I. But these inner sanctums remind us that we are. 

More than that, they give us a glimpse of how someone else is navigating a space similar to our own. They show us what it might look like to approach life, and its challenges, a different way. To embrace joys in a different way. To shift our perspective and find something else to see in this mess of a thing we call life. 

Our testimony lives in these spaces. It lives in our actual lives. In the quiet place where we're actually living...the ones we don't think we want anyone to see. 

But what a breath of fresh air it is to see one of these. What an encouragement. What a boost to my faith and to yours. 

If someone like you is doing it in the quiet place where you live, then there really is hope for someone like me in the place where I'm living. If you're figuring it out in a place just like the one I'm trying not to let anyone see, then maybe I can figure it out, too. 

Maybe we need to spend more time these days in each others' bedrooms (not literally). We need to see the posters on the walls and the pictures in the frames and the tears on the pillows and the color choices and the hard nights and the long days and the everything...the everything that shapes our own lives, too, but only in our private places. 

Maybe if we saw more of each other's spaces, we'd be reminded all over how beautiful they really are. And, well, if your space is that beautiful...

...maybe mine can be, too.