Why Make A Home In The Hallway?

My husband and I have spent the past couple of years in what we have affectionately labeled “the hallway of life” – a season where almost every area in our life felt like it was in transition. A fun little term for a less than fun time :)

Beyond the significant transition of engagement to marriage, in our following first year of marriage he was in the throes of an intensive graduate program and I was the “temporary” sole breadwinner for us. We changed churches, debated moving to another state, and I changed careers. To top things off, we braved a unique short-term living arrangement (in an effort to save money), which was sorta just the cherry on top of the struggle sundae.

As much as there was joy and gratefulness to be had during that time, transition can really suck. And what’s more, transitional living can really suck. Sometimes, it doesn’t even seem worth it to fully settle in to a place that you intend to move on from quickly. But feeling like you’re always waiting on the next thing is exhausting – and I think that it’s only made worse by our natural resistance to embrace the temporary. In fact, I think that physically settling in to our environment is always worth it to boost our morale when contentment is hard to come by.

Can I tell you why? Hopefully you’re nodding your head, because I’m going to do just that :)

Seeing that descriptive accuracy is very important to me, I think it’s best to start with what I mean by “transitional”. In the context I’m talking about, transitional living means any short-term living arrangement that inherently requires you to always be thinking ahead to where you’ll living be next. There are all sorts of reasons we may be this position of taking up residence somewhere that doesn’t feel permanent – and not all of them are bad! In fact, many of them merely mark the presence of necessary and helpful life seasons that we walk through. But whether it’s having a college apartment, extending a stay in another country, living with parents or in-laws for a time, or simply renting a place instead of buying, it feels like the fluidity of “home” often plagues the younger years of adulthood.

Personally, I have been hopping from one transitional living situation to another for the last 6 years. In that time, it feels like I’ve covered a lot of the bases: moving away for college and coming back for summers, living with my parents then moving out to be married – then, living with my husband in a house with other people (yes, you heard that right… I’ll come back to that) before moving to the two bedroom apartment we’re in now.

And honestly, even this apartment feels temporary to us. Don’t get me wrong, it was incredibly exciting to move into our own space, and I feel the most settled I’ve felt in a long time! But we still plan to move in the next year or two – just into a different rental that’s better suited for growing our family, since it will likely be a while before we can afford to actually buy a house. However, despite knowing that this apartment is short term, I still highly prioritize making this space feel like our own. Even before moving in, I spent weeks playing the walk-through video of our unit over and over and over, dreaming about how we’d arrange it.

Looking back, I can see that this priority was present throughout all the transitionary phases that came before this, too. Most notably, this was obvious during the “unique living arrangement” that I keep alluding to.

Immediately after our wedding, we moved in with an older couple from our church (barely acquaintances, at that time), sharing the house with them as if we were their children. We had two bedrooms and a bathroom to ourselves, and they came fully furnished – which was a blessing because we wouldn’t have been able to afford much at that point. But I was determined to make it feel like “our place”, so we spent hours space planning, rearranging, and making it fit our style as much as possible. We even bought a tiny Christmas tree so we could decorate for the season, even though there was still a full-sized tree in the living room we all shared.

And I can say without hesitation that it was SO worth it!

One could argue that I’m biased in this regard by my love for interior design… and one may be right ;) . But whether or not you personally have a propensity towards home decorating, nobody can argue against the fact that having a functional, beautiful, and personal home is valuable. It’s just a question of how valuable – and in this case, is it valuable enough to work towards when you know it will inevitably be dismantled?

I say yes. And the reason I think so comes down to this:

Physically settling in to our environment encourages the heart and mind to follow suit, even when our circumstances demand a state of transition.

It is a necessary and good part of living to look ahead with anticipation of our future hopes, dreams, and plans. But letting ourselves get stuck there can steal opportunities for joy in the now. Because there is joy in the now – yes, even when you feel like you’re still waiting for life to “really begin”.

I think we short-change our adaptability by assuming that in order to live like that’s true we need to white-knuckle our way into a different attitude, rather than changing what we can of our physical environment and letting that influence our inner selves. Our dwelling place has a much larger influence on our psyche than we give it credit for. If it really is true that “home is where the heart is”, then shouldn’t we make our home a place where our heart wants to be? I think it follows that neglecting to embrace a transitional environment basically encourages our hearts to leave us in the dust of discontented yearning.

In my experience, putting in the effort to fully establish myself in every place I live has been my best weapon against discontentment in a transitional season. When we first contemplated moving in with the folks from church, I told my husband, “I know they said we could stay as long as a year, but I’d like to be out of there in 6 months, tops”. To spend more time than that in a shared space during our first year of marriage sounded like torture to me! But surprisingly, we stayed for the full year – and although we were definitely ready to have our own space by the end, I can truly say that it was not torture! In fact, in a lot of ways it was wonderful. Most notably, it was wonderful for our bank account :)

Of course, we have wonderful landlords-turned-honorary grandparents to thank for the unexpectedly wonderful stint in their home. But in hindsight, I think it was really our commitment to settling in that tipped the scales from tolerably pleasant to truly life-giving.

It would have been easy (reasonable, even) to all but live out of our suitcases, refusing to fully unpack for fear of becoming complacent in the less-than-ideal. But we found that turning our environment into a place of comfort, personality, and beauty allowed us to focus on the “now” in a much more physical way. In a lot of ways, it helped to close the mental tab of physical transition, which freed up our minds to focus on the other things that were actually demanding our immediate attention during that time.

Life is a lot easier to live when you’re pulling your clothes out of a closet instead of a suitcase – and I mean that both metaphorically and literally! There’s even a connection to be made to the realities of our Christian walk, I think. We know that this life is temporary – either we will die and go on to live in eternity, or Jesus will come back and we will go on to live in eternity (whichever comes first). And yet, we are not called to have our metaphorical suitcases packed, ignoring the world with our noses pressed to the window, just waiting around for Jesus to return. Instead, we’re called to settle in – to love one another sacrificially; to establish ourselves in community; to serve; to make disciples; to lean in to God’s plan for our earthly lives. Talk about a life-long hallway!

I know this is probably not the last “hallway” we’ll find ourselves in in life. I suspect some of these same feelings will come back around when we’re empty nesters some day, awaiting retirement or grandkids to give our lives purpose again. But the Lord has taught me a lot during this time about what it means to make a home in the hallway – which is really what our whole lives are about, in the context of eternity.

And thanks to the Lord, there is joy to be found – even in the now :)