Work Unfiltered Spotlight: Fixer Upper

“Even locked doors can be unlocked in time.” The Magnolia Story

I just finished reading Magnolia Story, a book about Chip and Joanna Gaines, the incredible designers and home flippers from the show Fixer Upper. Their book is a story about how they got to their incredible current gig where they help homeowners find a place, Chip does the ground work to fix up the place, and Joanna adds her own unique design touches to the place. I actually saw Joanna Gaines’ testimony about her relationship with God circling the internet awhile ago, and was excited to jump in and see how this incredible couple got a great family and the job of their dreams.

And to be honest with you, it wasn’t their dream at all. They weren’t sitting around for years hoping to one day get a tv show. It was simply a new and great opportunity that opened up as they went along doing the things they loved, and amazingly enough combined many of their interests into one.

The book has a lot of fun stories over the years, but one of my favorites was Joanna’s story of her store. She did an internship in New York as a college student in journalism, and had actually spent much time admiring local shops and thinking it might be fun to start one herself one day. It started simply as an interest, and then grew to remaking parts and selling them to friends. Eventually, she got a word from God to go buy an amazing building and it was reduced to half price so she could buy it. It was fun to hear how she started her small shop in 2005 called Magnolia, selling little antique collectibles and unique home inspired goods. Her story tells the terror of stepping out somewhere you aren’t sure about, the hard work of sticking with it when it seems impossible, and then amazingly, the closing of doors. Her shop was doing great, but she was a mom of two and trying to help her husband with his business and run hers was a bit too much. She was heartbroken when God asked her to lay it down and close up shop.

And the hardest part of laying things down is when you don’t know if you’ll ever get to pick them up again. You get to move onto something else great– raising a family, or a new job, or another passion. But what about what you gave up in the process?

Which is why one of my favorite parts of the book was one of the last chapters, when Joanna talks about the day she got to open up her shop again. Eight years after she had closed it down. Eight years after she had thought that dream was done. But just over eight years after God told her to close her one-man shop front, she was able to open in two giant silo’s- 16,000 square feet of space with a hoard of family and friends and local artists now helping work and sell and create something much better than she ever could have dreamed just years before. Joanna writes, “He turned my little dream, my mustard seed of faith into all this. Not even a decade after I made that difficult decision to close my shop and stay home with my babies, God delivered on the promise of making my dreams come true it ways that were bigger than I ever imagined.”

Writing has been a long hidden interest of mine- pushed down somewhere long ago since my crazy short stories as a child and buried by my busy career as an adult. For a long time, I worried the short-hand and to-the-point style of medicine would ruin anything I’d ever learned about grammar and writing. But every week that I post a blog and even just one person reads or comments on it, I begin to dream of much, much more possibility than life currently suggests. I awaken a dream I forgot I could believe in. And I thank God that even when we have to give up on something for awhile, He never forgets.

What is it that God has written on your heart to do in life? Are you dedicating just a little time to it now, or is this a season where you’ve had to lay it down and wonder if you’ll ever see it again? Are you still trusting that God has got you no matter what it looks like now?

 

“Go and find what it is that inspires you, go and find what it is that you love, and go do that until it hurts. Don’t quit, and don’t give up. The reward is just around the corner. And in times of doubt or times of joy, listen for that still, small voice. Know that God has been there from the beginning- and he will be there until the end.” The Magnolia Story