Embracing the Process

Why is it that trying to finish the decor in a space can be so frustrating?! You have an idea, a plan, a vision, but sometimes seeing the completed vision of that space come to fruition takes a while. I know I’ve shared before about taking risks, and being ok with making mistakes when decorating your spaces before, and it’s all apart of this thing called “process”. We don’t talk a lot about the process, or always show what that process looks like. Who doesn’t love a good Before & After, but it’s rare we see how we got from the Before to the After. And what happens if you get stuck in the middle? I think the same can be said about life sometimes. We start out with a plan or a dream, and things don’t always go as planned, or so we think. Could it be that we are just stuck in the middle somewhere? The process.

In my devotions this past week, I was reminded of how our process in life can be a lot like decorating a room. We can have these great plans, dreams and visions, but sometimes in the middle it feels like someone pressed a pause button on our plans, and we aren’t quite sure why. In this fast paced world that I like to refer to as a “drive-thru society”, where we expect things instantly, we can sometimes forget to embrace the process. We learn valuable things in the process we wouldn’t otherwise normally figure out about ourselves, or perhaps the space we are decorating.  I know there have been plenty of times in my life where I have felt like God pressed paused on my plans or dreams, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why? Things were going just great, and then all of a sudden I was at a standstill which seemed to last forever. But instead of focusing on the fact that I wasn’t moving forward, what if I instead focused on what I needed to be learning in that moment that would better equip me for when I did reach my dream? I know I’ve shared our living room transformation with you before, but just in case you are new here, I couldn’t help but share because it truly was a process. When we first bought our house, our living room was decorated with everything I had acquired in the first years we were married. It was towards the end of using bold colors phase, we had no money for decor after just buying our first home, and having our second baby. So I used what I had and it still felt warm and cozy and inviting. Was it my dream space, no, but provided comfort for our family and that’s what is most important no matter what stage you are at in the process. So here is our classic before – black furniture, too small of an area rug, and a whole lotta pattern 🙂 I love pattern, and especially mixing patterns, but as you may remember from before, patterns and my dream design don’t exactly go hand in hand. So I began the process of transforming our space. We were on a tight budget then, so things didn’t happen over night mind you. I scrimped and saved, used christmas money, birthday money, left over tax return money, any place I could squirrel away a few extra dollars I would.

I diy’d some pillows, got new lamps, and a new, larger, area rug. This was all done in my first year of blogging, and it’s pretty funny to go back and read about it. Then I got up the courage to tackle a new paint color. It wasn’t that I was afraid of painting, but growing up in a new construction home where all the walls were white, and never got painted anything else, the thought of painting my walls white made me cringe at the time in fear of feeling like it did when I was a kid, lol. So I went as close as I could and painted our living room Halo.

I thought because I had put the white slip cover back on our sofa, painted our walls as close to white as I could personally go, that I needed to swap out my white curtains for a sublet ticking stripe curtain. During this part of the process I ended up taking one step forward and two steps back. Yes I was working my way towards the neutral space I was craving, but I thought I had to compensate my new neutral choices for more pattern to balance things out. But in reality it was just holding me back from achieving my dream space. Yes I had made progress, but I’ve also said before that sometimes we need to just take risks in our decorating, because you see if I hadn’t embraced this part of the process I would have missed out on learning a valuable lesson. While I like pattern, and bold colors, they hold me back from achieving my ultimate design plan.

It’s easy to appreciate the process when we can look back at photos like these and visually see things transpiring, but we don’t always get that luxury when we are in the process of our own lives. Sure I can look back now at the different stages our living room has been in, but I can promise you while I was in the middle of this process there were definitely moments of frustration, lack of motivation, and feeling like I was never going to accomplish what I sought out to do. One of my favorite worship songs reminds me that in the process of life I am not alone. Amanda Cook from Bethel sings it so eloquently. In the first lines of the song “Shepherd” she sings ” In the process, in the waiting, you’re making melodies over me”. I always feel rest assured that no matter how frustrated or deflated I feel in the process of life, I am not alone. That God has a purpose and a plan for my life, {Jeremiah 29:11}. He sees the end design even when I don’t. So in that frustrating place we call the middle, we can embrace it, knowing that there are valuable lessons to learn, that will better equip us for the dreams we are walking towards. If I had never bought that bold rug, or made those chevron pillow covers, I would have missed out on learning more about myself and how to achieve my dream space. If I hadn’t of embraced it, I could have over looked it, and I probably wouldn’t have ended up with the space you see today.

So whether you are in the middle of transforming one of your spaces, or in the middle of walking towards your dreams and goals in life; Embrace the process, because there is so much we can learn from it. And know that you never have to walk through that process alone.

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