Looking Back

You learn a lot about yourself when looking back...

Looking back...I loved garage sales!  Yard sales. And even more so...estate sales!

They were unexpected surprises while driving down the road.  Spontaneous adventures with suspense...what treasures can I find with the little change in my purse?  And wondering, how generous would my mom be...I better be really sweet! To this day, my mom and I can't pass up a good garage sale!

I loved to collect items & decor for my bedroom at those sales.  I would often rearrange all my bedroom furniture & redecorate it before my mom had any idea of what I had been doing.  One phase I went through was cutting out pages of my Seventeen Magazines (1988-1989) and tape them up on my wall in quite an orderly fashion.

I'm glad I didn't decide to go into fashion design! 

(and you probably are too)

During the summer months of college years, I'd spend time finding more treasures for my dorm room, spray painting anything I could spruce up a bit, piecing things together to make the perfect home away from home.

Is it any wonder that I now find myself rearranging decor in my house, staging it in a new way that makes it feel like a new room or piece of furniture, and then just for fun, taking a picture of it? For what? I didn't know.  I just thought I was kinda weird.

It comes down to this...I like to do it!  It's energizing for me!  It fills me! 

At first, I would put myself down for spending so much time on frivolous things like this, calling myself a name - a "perfectionist" (which wasn't a positive trait in my mind). So instead of enjoying something that brought me joy as a young girl...I felt shunned. 

And I was the shunner!  

That is until I took the Strength-Finder test and one of my top 5 strengths was an "arranger".  (Not a forest ranger; someone who likes to arrange things) It described myself so succinctly it was scary, yet it made me feel normal. However, it was exactly what I needed to give myself permission to be myself and embrace the strengths God had given me....instead of condemning myself.

I think when we are small we just do what our heart desires;

 what our heart, spirit, and mind moves us to do.  

It's natural. It's fun. It's us in a nutshell.  

And then we grow up and do what we think us adults are supposed to do or "should" do, and we forget what passions stirred our hearts from the beginning.  Then at mid-life we start asking ourselves, "who am I?"  

Hence the reason to look back......at yourself and remember the things that made your heart beat a little faster and put a bounce in your step and a smile on your face without you even knowing.

So...(the Southerners here call this my northern accent) I'm going to keep on rearranging and staging random decor around my house and strangely take pictures of it. But now I have a place to share them, and I have this blog to remind me (and you) to celebrate the strengths God has given each of us!

Here is a staging tribute to my Mom & Dad 

who frequently took my brother and I to sales & auctions every open Saturday.

(Mom, who looks like Shirley Temple, in between her parents

and Dad on the right in his favorite reindeer shirt)