I went on my first Home Tour a month ago. My sister is a member of her Rotary Club and the home tour is one of their major fundraisers for the year. A friend of hers was in charge of the event, so I had an inside look at what it took to organize and run the day. What I found most surprising was that the most difficult task of the entire event was to find people willing to put their homes on display.
My sister lives in a beautiful part of California where there is a plethora of beautiful, historical, unique, or cutting edge homes, and I was under the assumption that people would be falling all over each other to show off their homes, but that definitely was not the case. A variety of reasons were given, but the two most prevalent were—first, some wanted to do some more fixing up before saying yes, and second, some just didn’t want people looking at their homes.
After going on the home tour, I can now understand why. Opening your home to the public means opening yourself up to public scrutiny and criticism. People you don’t even know now feel free to comment on your choices of décor and design, and where’s the fun in that?
We’re no different, are we? How often do we keep the gate locked on our own lives until we can clean up this area or spruce up or get rid of that part of our life? We will let people take a peek from the sidewalk, and we might even let them into the front yard to see a few of the things we are proud of, but they won’t be passing over the threshold of our thoughts or private actions, will they? Whether it is a fear of rejection or shame or criticism, we do not want to make ourselves vulnerable.
Many people shy away from approaching God for this very same reason. They feel they have to clean up their lives before they can come to Him. But the truth is, as C.S. Lewis stated, “God doesn’t want something from us, He simply wants us.”
Throughout the Bible, the Lord says “come.” There isn’t a verse that says “come after” we have done something or cleaned up our lives but just “come.” Come and experience His immeasurable love and peace, and leave the cleaning up to Him.
He makes two promises to us if we do “come” and give Him the reins of our lives to Him. First in Isaiah 1:18 He says, “Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, I will make them as white as wool.”
And second, He reminds us that the cleaning process takes time but as Paul reminds us, we can be “confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.”
All of us fear vulnerability, but only when lay our lives open can the “healing begin.”
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