Find Your Shiplap: What You Have in Common with Joanna Gaines
It’s decidedly inspiring to watch someone find their stride. I’d even say beautiful. Watching someone come into their own, so to speak. A toddler grinning from ear to ear as they take their first steps, literally finding their stride. Doing what they were born to do.
For me, it’s been watching my husband get lost in carpentry projects, see how my older sister can captivate a room full of adolescents as she teaches history, or my younger sister use her whit and compassion to become this attentive and joyful mom. For you, maybe it’s watching your son or daughter come alive with passion for baseball or dancing or chemistry.
Psychologists call this sort of thing “flow,” or an experience of “deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life.”1 It’s those moments when you don’t notice the passage of time because you are so involved, so engaged in what you are doing. You are so wrapped up in the moment. Maybe you’ve experienced it. It’s like the human spirit comes to life and finds new energy. In those moments we seem to be revitalized by something beyond us. Our mind and heart are wrapped up in this experience. It almost has a transcendent quality to it.
As humans, I think we are wired to experience “flow” and I think we recognize it when we see it in others. It’s that moment where you notice that person has this innate talent or they get so immersed in doing their thing. Who didn’t get the chills when you heard Susan Boyle’s audition on America’s Got Talent? It’s like there was some divine energy infusing those moments and it unites us somehow; it takes us beyond ourselves. We recognize the unique beauty flowing through Susan’s song; through her voice, but also through her heart, her vulnerability.
I also think it is this element of flow that lies behind the magnetic draw to Joanna Gaines of Magnolia and the Fixer Upper series. It’s as though she’s been born to design, to thoughtfully craft personalized spaces for families. Spaces where families can host and live, where they can let their guard down and simply be present with one another. The personalized space invites that way of being. And the space usually involves shiplap. Joanna loves the stuff.
I actually think that’s the tricky part about beauty standards. These standards force us into the same mold by defining “this” is what beauty is. It is thin or it is young and it is all about perfection and striving. One kind of beauty is promoted and that is what we as women are rewarded for in so many ways. But what if we were less focused on our image and, even more so, less focused on “being “beautiful” in the same way. What if we weren’t the lemmings our culture invites us to be and, instead, explored and stepped into our unique identities?
The truth is, if you listen long enough, your heart will let you know what you’re passionate about, where you find flow. I do think it is those areas of flow where we experience the divine, where God is present. For whatever reason, we have been wired in this way, to lose ourselves in the beauty of painting or writing or laughing with our kids or carpentry or even crafting spaces with shiplap. We find those channels of beauty, those divine rays of Life, breaking in all over the place if we are open to them.
If we are open to a larger view of beauty than the myopic view that we are so often given, I think we will start stumbling upon our own unique passions, those places and things that cause us to truly come alive. That kind of beauty is decidedly diverse and dynamic. It looks different as it emerges from each one of us.
I believe we have each been uniquely crafted in the image of ultimate Beauty. Made in the image of God, we each reflect His heart and splendor in so many unique and beautiful ways. The problem is, if we are so caught up in looking like and doing what is trendy and absorbed in all the cultural “rules” for beauty (dieting, looking young, etc.), we may miss the internal cues that call us into the streams of beauty we have been created to live into and reflect.
So, go ahead, get quiet and listen. You have been uniquely and so beautifully crafted by Love itself. There is passion, there is “flow,” in you and all around you. If you get attentive enough, still enough, and curious enough, I guarantee you, there are things that you are so gifted at and so passionate about. Like Joanna Gaines and like Susan Boyle, you have unique and beautiful gifts that can only flow through you, those things you get lost in and bless others with. So, go ahead, find your shiplap.
[1]Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Perennial Modern Classics: 2008.
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