There's a place for everyone in The Blue Room

What's in a name? A quick refresher

Hello friends,

Today we welcome a bunch of new subscribers to the Blue Room, and also welcome longtime subscribers to a new platform. It’s our first day at Substack!

With the changeover, I thought I’d share once again the story of The Blue Room, and why it’s been such a resonant image for me for so long:

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When our kids were little, we had the first floor of our house painted—living room, family room, kitchen and dining room. We chose a rich blue for our dining room, and it was my favorite color of the ones we chose. The trouble was, we never used the dining room. We just weren’t in a “formal dining” stage of our lives. With three small children, we were into simpler fare—tacos on the everyday plates, not tuna tartare on the china.

For me, the dining room became a source of low-level stress, a 120-square-foot monument to the lives we weren’t living. The room was also a waste of space, sitting there and waiting for us to be different than we were.

I finally decided that life was too short to be held hostage to the Should. So during the Snowpocalypse of 2010, we shoved the dining room table up against a wall, moved in a desk, organized our arts and crafts supplies into baskets and bins, and transformed the dining room that we used maybe two days a year into the Blue Room, which we used every day of the year.

The Blue Room became where my daughter Caroline worked on homework, or where we made beads together. It’s where Mel would slip away to draw yet another series of smiling animal pictures. It’s where toddler James pounded on Play-Doh. And it’s where I wrote, worked on sermons, read, knit, and did other creative things.

Now those kids are [almost] grown, and we don’t live in that starter house anymore. But the Blue Room remains an idea, and an ideal. The Blue Room is a place to receive life as it really is and consider life in all the wonder it could be. A place to be creative, to share art, books, and ideas. A place to embrace the imperfect beauty of the world. A place to glimpse the sacred in the secular… or to consider that it’s all sacred, really.

Over the years, the Blue Room has been a blog, an email newsletter, and a combination of the two. These days, I’m hosting my work at Substack.

Welcome. There’s a place for everyone in the Blue Room.