We were in downtown Kansas City and the Plaza was busy…lots of people going lots of places. I love the Plaza and all the energy and fun of it. After a pretty great meal at the Cheesecake Factory, we walked around, ducking into stores periodically to defrost because the evening was chilly.
At one point, we slipped inside RE: – a shop packed full of home furnishing items, some really beautiful, some really quirky and fun. The layout of the store invited exploration – it was divided up into different sections or rooms, and each one had at least a loosely based theme – with items from local artists.
Coming around a corner and taking a few steps to the lower level, I saw a large, white framed canvas on the wall. Elsie’s quote was printed on it. No ornamentation, nothing else…just the phrase printed simply in grey letters.
The message itself was the focus.
Elsie de Wolfe was an interior decorator in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s and her words are descriptive of what she tried to do for her clients. Many of the people she designed for were people whose names we would still recognize today – the Vanderbilts, Cole Porter, Condé Nast, the Windsors. I have copies of this quote in tiny silver frames on both my work and home desks. I just love it.
I was thinking of Elsie’s quote last week and how this business of interior decorating isn’t limited to homes and offices – it lends itself pretty neatly to the development and arrangement of our personal lives, too. While some of us really do decorate commercial or residential properties as our life’s work, every one of us labors on something far more important. Beautiful as they can be, wood and stone, brick and mortar are temporal; they won’t last.
Souls do. And this lasting reaches far, far into the eternal future. The construction and decorating projects we do in our souls have to be renewed constantly, don’t they? A figurative wall of self-pity knocked out here, an allegorical window of faith put in there. Making things around us beautiful won’t happen without a tending to all the possibilities of beauty that lie inside each and every one of us – “in the deep downs” as Kate DeCamillo’s Miggory Sow says.
As we start inwardly and work outwardly, we’ll spread joy, beauty, hope and promise in every direction. Doesn’t this sound like the stuff of Heaven; like what we are specifically put here on earth to do? It’s how we help bring the exquisite loveliness of the Kingdom.
And something I’ve learned over the years? It’s absolutely impossible not to internalize at least some part of a good thing we do for someone else. Even the good we do out of somewhat selfish motives (and trust me, we’ve all been there), does some quiet refining. It has to, because every beautiful thing is a reflection of Him and would be wholly impossible without Him. So anything good is able – at least in some sense – to stand on its own merit. I love this, too!
There’s so much ugly in the world right now. Let’s think of ways to make our corner of it more beautiful. Let’s adopt Elsie’s words as our own, but let’s do it together. ♥️