Pottery Barn is the Devil

I talked to my friend Annie yesterday. Annie was my roommate in Budapest five years ago, and since then, we’ve only seen each other 1 time for about 2 hours – she picked me up from LAX and drove me to Pasadena a couple summers ago. Strangely enough, though, we are just about as good friends now as we have ever been. She is in the process of moving to France to begin work with a mission agency there. (Waiting on a Visa; prayers requested). Basically, we have identical lives – English majors at Christian Lib Arts schools, spent a year teaching in Hungary, came home, got MAs in Rhetoric and Composition, and are now both finding our way back to ministry in Europe. I am more grateful for her than I can say, and when I called her sort of randomly last night, she was overjoyed to hear from me. “I have been carrying my cell phone around for a week, hoping you’d call,” she told me, “I really needed to hear from you! I think this is a divine appointment!”

Previously, I think I would have chalked up a statement like that to over-dramatic-ness, but the way things in my own life have been going, I think she’s right. There are such things as divine appointments – phone calls that come just when you need them, emails from distant friends who just happen to think to pray for you. The Holy Spirit is working in the world. He really is. Why do I ever doubt this? Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about prayer. Prayer has become so natural for me here – probably because I live alone and have no pets, so talking to God is the only way I can have conversations! Seriously, though, I am learning so much about what prayer really does. One thing I have noticed is that prayer makes you aware of what God is doing. Sometimes we might want to just attribute things that happen to coincidence or human effort, but when you pray, you are aware that God is acting. It isn’t even a matter of God simply responding to our prayers. Rather, He is always there working, desiring to enter our lives and times, and when we pray, we wake up to the already-existent reality of God’s work. Prayer helps me see everyday occurrences with the eyes of the Spirit.

And so when Annie tells me that my phone call was a divine appointment, I believe her. She is battling through all the same emotions and questions and doubts that I did in my preparation to move to Lithuania. She is doing the whole, pack-your-apartment, sell-your-car, live-out-of-a-suitcase-for-a-month-before-leaving thing that I did. I was able to share with her all the messy emotions that accompany packing up one’s well-beloved dishes. I know dishes should not represent much of significance when one is deciding how to best serve Jesus, but in a way they do. Annie and I are both 27. A good chunk of our friends are married and have gotten to go through the “setting up house/nesting” phase of their lives. These friends have gotten to register at places like Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel for all those lovely ceramic bowls and wine glasses. They have salad tongs. Heck, I have spent quite a bit of my own money buying said salad tongs and wine glasses after peering over those print-out registry lists you get with wedding invitations these days.

Annie mentioned that she had gone into Crate and Barrel the other day. “Why did you do that!” I exclaimed over the phone, “That place is the Devil!” What I meant was, going into such places is only a reminder that neither she nor I get to “nest.” While most 27-year-olds we know are well into furnishing apartments and homes, and probably have achieved the dream of all-matching silverware, she and I are boxing things up, taking pictures off the wall, and starting over. What I see in those beautiful dishes and bedspreads and smelly candles is the lure of the comfortable, the safe, the fantasy of domestic bliss not found this side of the Donna Reed show.

I am NOT playing a small violin of pity for either of us. Not even remotely. We are both ecstatic beyond measure that God has allowed us to be chosen for service in these ways. Nevertheless, when you’re 27 and all your worldly possessions are stacked in boxes in your parent’s basement, it’s hard not to wonder what’s wrong with you. Why you feel compelled to do such things – again and again?

And maybe that’s how this all connects with prayer. God is working in this world and Annie and I want to join in. That means more to us than fancy dishes and comfortable apartments filled with the laughter of old friends. It means we are trying to be responsible to the call we’ve received, to live lives worthy of that calling. Every believer has this calling – not necessarily the same one – but I wonder how often we pay attention to it, how often we can hear it? Prayer helps me hear. Prayer helps us drown out the nagging voices of consumerism and biological clocks and the voices that would tell us to just settle down and be comfortable. Prayer is allowing God’s voice to speak more clearly and sharply than anything else, and to order my life by it.

(Next blog, stay tuned for why Baby Gap is the anti-Christ.)