Are you longing for a place where you can feel at home in your soul? If so, you may be a placemaker. Author Christie Purifoy writes beautifully about what placemakers do in Placemaker.
The Importance of Being a Placemaker
This world is ever-changing, and our society has never been more mobile. Yet deep in our souls, we long for a place to put down roots and feel secure in our souls. Christie tells us how to do this as placemakers wherever we live.
She writes with lyrical, dreamy prose that hushes the noise around you and settles you into your center. Through gorgeous word pictures, personal stories and historical data about plants, Christie invites you to slow down and consider what feels like home to you. You need to plan on sipping this book slowly like a cup of hot tea to enjoy the rich language.
Christie was raised in Texas and moved around to various places like Florida, Virginia and Illinois before settling in Maplehurst, her peaceful Pennsylvania farmhouse. She speaks about being a placemaker in each of those locales, yet she calls Maplehurst her favorite. For good reason, I believe. I’ve seen her Instagram feed and the pictures of her antique home are charming.
This book will help you explore why home is important and how we can redeem each of our homes as placemakers. We can usher peace, beauty and faith into this tossed-about world by deliberately choosing to put down roots. Even if you live in a rental, Christie shows you by example how you can be an intentional placemaker there.
How Placemaker Applies to Me
I am a placemaker in the home my husband designed and built 15 years ago in the same area where four previous generations have called home. My German Lutheran ancestors farmed, worshiped and tended a general store within a mile of our property. I think my great-grandparents, who I was blessed to know, would be pleased that I’m now living in what they referred to as “Squirrel Woods” and worshiping in the same tiny church, now over 150 years old.
I have fallen in love with the eight acres of woods that surround our home, where I watch the flora and fauna change with the seasons. We regularly see wood ducks and blue heron at our pond, and now the spring peepers are singing their songs before the giant bullfrogs take over with their summer bellows. The wild turkeys and deer trot across the pond levee, and the squirrels constantly climb up and jump between the 60-foot tall maple and hickory trees.
Our home doesn’t yet have a name like Maplehurst, but perhaps I should find one for it. It needs to have something to do with redemption.
Being a placemaker has been one of my primary missions as an adult child of divorce. I longed for stability and security when I was tossed around against my will. Our home is more than Andersen windows, slate tiles, sheet rock and siding. It’s a place where I’ve tried my best to break the generational cycles of divorce and grow deep roots.
This is why I appreciate Placemaker so much. It tells me my love for my home is not superficial. It’s important, even holy, work in these troubled times. When you are a placemaker, you are a peacemaker. That’s what I’m setting out to be, and I’m happy to find additional inspiration and beauty in Christie’s book.
Our love for home is not superficial. It's important, even holy, in these troubled times. #weareplacemakers #home #hospitality #peace Click To TweetFavorite Quotes from Placemaker:
“Every place made by God is loved by God, and that includes every place where his people dwell.”
“Home is never simply a threshold you cross. It is a place you make and a place that might make–or unmake–you.”
“We cannot make a place new without attending to what it has been.”
“We taste, we talk, we share, and a place comes alive and reveals new dimensions of itself.”
Two years ago, Christie graciously appeared on my blog in a guest post for my gardening series. You can read the post and see a few pictures of Maplehurst here.
I received a preview copy of Placemaker from Christie’s publisher, Zondervan.
When you are a placemaker, you are a peacemaker. #weareplacemakers #bookreview #faith #hospitality Click To Tweet
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