This is a little different from what I normally share here. It’s less about a home we’ve designed and more about the story God has been writing through my own understanding of home—and, ultimately, through Dwelling Place. With some changes coming for our family and our business this fall, it felt like the right time to tell it.

Psalm 9:11 says, “Sing praises to the LORD, who sits enthroned in Zion! Tell among the peoples his deeds!”

Lately, I have been overwhelmed by the goodness of God. There are so many things happening in our lives right now that seem to bear His fingerprints. But as I have stopped to look back, I realize this story didn’t begin recently. There is a thread running through my life that I couldn’t see while I was living it.

God has been calling me home.

When I was a little girl, I loved Barbies, but perhaps even more than playing with the dolls, I loved making a home for them. A deaf woman in our church gave me a tiny wicker furniture set that was just the right size for Barbie. My grandmother had crocheted little hair bows for me, and I would use them as pillows for the furniture. I loved color and pattern and fabric. I loved arranging things and making spaces beautiful.

I didn’t know any of that meant anything.

Years later, I chose interior design as my college major for the very sophisticated reason that home economics required science classes and interior design did not. Not exactly a great moment of spiritual discernment. And yet, looking back, I can see that God was leading even when I had no idea I was being led.

College led to a job at a local design studio, marriage, then a move to Atlanta. One decorated tearoom for a friend later, and I found myself in business for myself. I loved it. I was happy working alone, doing something creative that came naturally to me.

Then we had our first child, and then another.

In early 2008, I began to sense God asking me to give up my business and stay home with our children. I didn’t want to. I wrestled with Him for months. I had worked hard to build something of my own, and walking away from it felt incredibly difficult.

Eventually, I surrendered.

God was calling me home.

What I couldn’t know was that by the end of that same year, the economy would collapse and many interior designers would lose their businesses. I hadn’t obeyed because I knew what was coming. I had obeyed because God said, “Go home.”

Over the next nine years, Bob and I added two more children to our family. From time to time, I would ask God if I could return to work. The answer always seemed to be no.

Then, in late 2017, I asked again.

This time, the answer was yes.

Our oldest child’s college years were approaching, and it had always been our plan for me to return to work and help pay for our children’s education. So, I reopened my business.

I started by staging homes to sell, which I quickly discovered I didn’t particularly enjoy. In hindsight, perhaps I understand why. Staging often felt like taking a home apart rather than creating one. I wanted to make spaces that reflected the people who lived there—places where families gathered, rested, celebrated and belonged.

Little by little, the business began to change and grow.

Then, in 2023, I began praying about something entirely different.

I knew design, but I didn’t know business. Suddenly, I had a growing company and a part-time employee, and so much of the business advice I encountered seemed focused on self—my success, my goals, my growth, my recognition.

I had grown up in a ministry family and married a pastor. That world felt foreign to me.

My prayer became: How do I run a business for God’s glory and not my own?

God answered in a way I never could have orchestrated.

He opened a door for me to join C12, a worldwide network of Christian business owners who see business as ministry. What I have learned through that community has changed the way I think about our company, our team, our clients and the purpose behind the work we do.

And the business continued to grow.

God began bringing us the kinds of design projects I once only dreamed about. Our little team grew. And in 2026, through another series of circumstances that could only have been God, He brought us a full-time junior designer.

Suddenly, the business that had once fit easily into our home didn’t fit so easily anymore.

For some time, Bob and I had been talking about the next home for Dwelling Place. As our team and projects grew, it seemed clear that we needed more room—a dedicated place to work together, meet with clients, spread out samples and presentations, and continue growing well.

We assumed that meant a commercial design studio.

In fact, some of our clients and friends have heard us talk about that plan. We looked at spaces, considered possibilities, and genuinely expected a studio to be our next step.

But one door after another closed.

At first, that was discouraging. I knew we needed more space, and I couldn’t understand why the solution that seemed so logical wasn’t coming together.

Then one night in the middle of the summer, I was praying and thinking through all the options when a very simple realization came to me: I really like working from home.

Not because I don’t want Dwelling Place to grow. I do. I love the work God has given us, the team He has assembled, and the clients and homes we have the privilege of serving.

But while we still have children at home, I also desire to be present with them. I want to be around for the conversations that happen in the middle of ordinary days. I don’t want to build a successful business only to discover that the way I built it pulled me away from something God had already shown me was deeply important.

The more Bob and I talked and prayed about it, the more we began to wonder if we had been thinking about the question too narrowly.

Maybe Dwelling Place did need a studio.

Maybe it just didn’t need to be in a commercial building.

And then another thought came: Maybe we should look for a different house.

This made absolutely no sense.

We love our house. In fact, this house is another story of God’s goodness—His provision for us after both of my parents died in 2019 and His kindness in settling us here just as the pandemic was beginning.

We weren’t looking for another house.

We were looking for a home for a growing design business.

But I opened my computer anyway.

And the first house I found seemed almost too perfectly suited to what we needed. It was one level, something that matters tremendously to me, and it had an area that could become a dedicated Dwelling Place studio—with its own entrance, presentation space, kitchenette, bathroom and storage.

Everything I had been trying to find in a commercial space was there.

Our team could have room to work. Our clients could have a beautiful, dedicated place to meet with us. The business could continue to grow in the ways it needed to.

And I could still be home.

It wasn’t the studio we had pictured.

It was something better suited to this particular season of our lives: a true working studio for Dwelling Place, thoughtfully separated from our family’s living space, but still under the same roof.

And it wasn’t just a solution for me. The house also provided a separate office for Bob, solving another need for our family that we hadn’t set out to address.

The more we looked at it, the more it seemed that God might be answering needs for both our family and the business in a way neither of us had considered.

And so began the whirlwind of buying another home.

Our plan, naturally, was to sell our current one.

Except something didn’t feel right.

Neither of us could get comfortable with putting our house on the market. Then a possibility that we had talked about before began to take shape in a new way.

What if someday this house could become a healing house?

A place where hurting people could come for a little while and rest. Pastors. Missionaries. Families walking through difficult seasons. People who simply need a safe place to land.

We don’t know whether that’s ultimately what God has for this house. But once the thought was there, we began to see the possibility of preserving it rather than selling it.

And then we wondered: What about now?

Our eldest daughter is at the beginning of her adult life. What if she stayed here? What if we rented the other rooms to young women who also needed a safe, affordable place to live, allowing the house to support itself while we preserved it for whatever God might have for it in the future?

As Bob and I prayed through that possibility, the noise began to clear.

And then came all the little things.

For years, we have been saving furniture for our eldest daughter in our attic, knowing that someday she would have a home of her own. As we began deciding what furniture would move with us and what would stay behind, we discovered something almost comical.

Everywhere we needed to take something, there seemed to be something in the attic waiting to replace it.

A bed. A table. A chair.

Piece by piece, what we already had was enough.

We could move and leave this home almost completely intact.

Then we needed tenants.

Within a remarkably short time of putting the word out, God provided young women already connected to our lives who needed exactly what this house could offer.

Once again, something we hadn’t planned seemed to come together at precisely the right moment.

We don’t know what God will ultimately do with this home. We don’t know what He will do with the next one. And I don’t know what Dwelling Place will look like five or ten years from now.

But I know what I can see when I look backward.

A little girl arranging tiny wicker furniture.

A college major chosen because she didn’t want to take science.

A young designer starting a business.

A mother laying that business down because God said, “Go home.”

Four children and nine years at home.

A quiet yes when it was time to begin again.

A prayer for wisdom.

A growing team.

Dream projects.

Closed doors to office spaces.

An unexpected house.

Furniture waiting in an attic.

And people who needed a home at precisely the moment we had one to offer.

Any one of those things could be called coincidence.

But when I stand back and see them together, I see a thread.

God keeps calling me home.

Sometimes He has called me away from work and toward home.

Sometimes He has called me to work that is literally about creating homes.

And now, when I thought the growth of that work might require me to leave home, He seems to have made a way for our family and the business to remain under one roof.

When I look at the larger story, I also see that He hasn’t been leading me alone. He has been leading us. Bob and I don’t know exactly what comes next. We don’t know what He will ultimately do with either of these houses.

But again and again, He has gone before us.

So today, I want to obey the words of Psalm 9:11 and “tell among the peoples His deeds.”

Not because I know what comes next.

But because I can look back and see who has been writing the story.

He was there with the tiny wicker furniture.

He was there in the surrender.

He was there in the waiting.

He was there when the answer finally became yes.

He was there behind the closed doors.

And He is here now.

God has been so very good.

And all along, He is calling me home.

Warmly,