Five years ago this week I loaded up my car in Gaithersburg, Maryland and headed out early on an icy morning towards the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia to do a room makeover for my Angie. It was an idea born the day I visited her at the cancer center for one of her chemotherapy treatments to treat her breast cancer. After her chemo I drove her to her home and went upstairs to her bedroom. As soon as I saw my dear friend's space I knew she needed a brighter, more comfortable and more peaceful place to heal.
I was someone who had bought and sold new homes and been blessed to work with designers on model homes for condo and new home developments. I had come to understand how rooms and things are really so much more when something personal is breathed into them. My passion for beautiful spaces had an opportunity to blossom from my childhood love of decorating. It was innate in me. My mom will tell you how obsessed I was with checking out design books from the library. I was fascinated with the texture and print of fabric and collecting things that were beautiful or meant something to me to add to my room. Until I was thirteen I shared a room with my sisters, and they pretty much always let me take the lead on design. I was most drawn to descriptive passages of people's homes in the books I read and, to this day, notice furniture illustrations in children's books before anything else. From my earliest memory I would pass homes in the dark and peer through the windows to see what the details of life might be like inside those walls. I imagined floorplans from just seeing the exterior. The importance of landscaping and curb appeal were never lost on me either.
I had read and studied about the importance of place and space on childhood development and also on healing in chronically ill or terminally ill patients. I had just survived three months of hospitalization during my pregnancy with Danica. The rooms there were so sterile and so depressing. I thought I had slipped into an alternate universe of ugly tile floors, horrible scratchy sheets and blankets and really bad pillows. I know for sure one of the things that helped me recover the most in those first weeks home from so much pain and trauma was my beautiful bed, cheerful art, comfy bedding and small details I treasured. My life was something of history and value in my own room. I hadn't felt that for a long time.
I didn't want Angie's room to be the last thing on the list of what mattered. I didn't want the pile of medical bills to be on the cluttered desk in plain view from where she would crash after chemo. I didn't want old polyester cabbage rose bedding with wilted pillows to be her recovery place. I wanted to surround her with simple but beautiful reminders of what she was fighting so hard for. I wanted a peaceful space for her to rest and a cheerful place for her friends and family to visit her when she couldn't make it downstairs. I left knowing what I should and could do for her.
I did not have any money. Dan and I were actually losing our home after the months of my unemployment and hospital stays, failed surgery attempts for my blocked kidney, C-section and Danica's NICU stay. We were already planning to sell most of what I just told you was so dear to me and move to Ohio to start over. I didn't let this stop the seed from growing. I asked Angie's mom for the names and email addresses of her friends and family. I wrote them to see if the could help me do this thing for her. So many answered with cards for Angie and donations of $10, $15, $20 . . . collectively enough to make some very special changes in her room. A friend of hers from church coordinated painting the room on a night Angie's husband, Brian, was taking Angie away. My sister, Rochelle and her husband, Doug, from West Virginia met me at Angie and Brian's home the following morning to complete the room transformation. I left a scrapbook of cards from all the people who had donated on her bed and two very special stones with the words "STRENGTH" and "HEALING" engraved in them.
Angie was overwhelmed with the gesture and the love. We could not have imagined following her breast cancer fight God would ask her to fight thyroid cancer for a second time and then colon cancer. Yes, my dear friend has had cancer four times in her less than forty years. I know intimately how the beautiful room and especially her bed became wrought with grief and suffering and healing and healing and healing again.
This is how "Angie's Room" was born. I have wanted to do it again. I have dreamed about it. I have prayed about it. I have talked about it. As I have laid in my own bed months and months following surgery after surgery and unspeakable pain the seed was germinating. I was asking God to bring me to any kind of place in my own life where I could take a passion He planted in me and grow it for someone else again. Today He let it blossom. "Andrea's Room" became a reality. It was as much love and Spirit of God as anything. I can't wait to tell you about her and her daughter, Grace, and her friend, Cindi, and show you the details of this new ministry.
One of my favorite life quotes is from Willa Cather, "Where there is great love there are always miracles." Angie is cancer free today. Andrea is fighting cervical cancer and was given 3-6 months to live late last summer. She is still here. We are asking for a miracle. Won't you pray for her tonight, for her husband Cary and their daughter, Grace? Tomorrow I will post more of her story including her testimony and pictures of the beautiful rooms we did today for both Andrea and Grace. I hope you will follow here as I seek to be faithful in God's leading to the next person who could be blessed by a room. I have a feeling this is only the beginning.
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