Everything Here Came From Somewhere Different

There are four chairs at your table and not one of them is a pair.

One came from your mother. One you bought in a hurry when somebody was coming and you were one short. One was in the house when you moved in and you never got round to doing anything about it. And one you cannot actually account for, which is the funniest of the four, because it has been there for years and you have no idea how.

You could tell me the history of every object in your front room. Not the price. The history. Who it belonged to, what week it arrived, what it replaced.

And you are slightly ashamed of the whole arrangement.

Not badly. Not so it stops you living. But when you look at a room in a magazine, or a room in somebody's house where everything clearly arrived at the same time from the same place, there is a small drop in you, and the word that appears is something like scrappy, or thrown together, or making do.

I want to work on that word, because the word is wrong, and it has been doing damage for years.

You are looking at a gathered house and describing it as a failed matched house.

Those are two entirely different things, and the second one does not exist. A gathered house is not an attempt at coordination that came out badly. It was never trying to do that. It is a different kind of object altogether, made a different way, and it has properties the matched one cannot have at all.

But nobody ever taught you to read one, so you have been grading yours against the only standard you were shown.

God hath tempered it together

There is a passage in First Corinthians about a body made of mismatched parts, and one verse in it does something people rarely notice.

For our comely parts have no need: but God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honour to that part which lacked: (1 Corinthians 12:24, King James Version)

God hath tempered the body together.

Tempered is a maker's word. It is what you do to metal and to clay and to a mixture: you bring separate things into a right relation with each other so that they work as one thing. It is not the same as matching. Nothing tempered is uniform. Tempering is what you do precisely because the parts are different.

And then the second half, which is the part that should stop you.

Having given more abundant honor to that part which lacked. The honor goes to the piece that was short of something. Not to the impressive one. God is described as deliberately weighting the arrangement toward whatever came up lacking.

That is not a consolation for having a mismatched set. That is a description of how the maker Himself arranges things, and it is the exact opposite of what a coordinated room does.

A matched room honors the whole by making every piece disappear into it. Nothing stands out, which means nothing is honored, because honor requires a thing to be seen as itself.

Your house cannot do that even if it wanted to. Every piece in it is visible as itself, with its own history, and the one with the least going for it is usually the one people ask about.

This is a house tempered together rather than matched, and tempering has never once meant making things the same. First Corinthians 12:24 gives the abundant honor to the part that lacked, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person read her own rooms properly.

What a gathered house has that a matched one cannot

Let me be specific, because I do not want to leave you with a nice feeling and nothing solid.

A gathered house holds time. Every object in yours arrived at a different moment in your life and carries that moment on it. Walking through your front room is walking through about twenty years. A room bought in one afternoon holds one afternoon, and there is no version of it that will ever hold more, no matter what it cost.

A gathered house holds people. Your mother is in that chair. Somebody who is not around any more is in that lamp. You can name who gave you things. A coordinated room contains no people at all, only decisions, and most of those decisions were made by a stranger in a warehouse.

And a gathered house cannot be copied. Nobody else has your four chairs. What you have is unrepeatable, which is the exact quality people are trying to buy when they buy the matched version and never manage to get.

I am not romanticizing not having money. Not having money is hard and I am not going to be charming about it. But the thing that came out of it is not a lesser room, and calling it one has cost you years of small daily shame in your own house.

What is in these rooms holds time and people that a bought set cannot hold, and it has never once been a failed attempt at matching. The written word describes a maker tempering unlike parts into one body, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a person what her own house is actually made of.

Three things that do not match, on purpose

So here is the assignment, and the last two words carry all of it.

Put three things that do not match on one shelf together on purpose.

Three objects that have nothing in common. Different materials, different eras, different colors, different origins. The more they clash the better this works.

And then arrange them. Properly. Spend four minutes on it. Move them around until they sit right together, which they will, because arrangement is a real skill and you have it and you have simply never applied it to things you were embarrassed by.

The word doing the work is on purpose.

Because everything mismatched in your house at the moment got there by circumstance, and you know it, and that is the whole source of the shame. It is not that things do not match. It is that you feel the arrangement happened to you.

One shelf, done deliberately, breaks that. You cannot look at a shelf you spent four minutes arranging and call it making do. It is the same kind of object as everything else in the room, and now there is one place in your house where it is unmistakably a decision.

That one shelf will start rereading the rest of the room for you. It takes a few days.

It is possible to arrange what you already own on purpose, and the mismatch has never once been the thing that shamed you. First Corinthians 12:24 shows a maker deliberately composing unlike parts, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman spending four minutes on one shelf.