Environment Matters!
Environment Matters
Where is your favorite place to go when you want to enjoy a calm and pleasant conversation with a dear friend?
Where do you go when you know you need to be productive? What sounds, smells, and surroundings help you focus?
These are matters of environment.
Usually, I spend my 'writing days' in my favorite coffee shop in our town. It's called The Flour District. Walking in, the first thing I notice is the warm and inviting decor. The general color scheme is soft with rich earthy tones, including several plants at the entrance. The furniture looks comfortable and varied to welcome guests with different needs: friends who just want to sit and chat, business people who come with laptop in hand to get some work done, families who want to spend some time together outside the house. The floors have a classic black and white tiny-tile design, while the back wall is covered in a jewel-toned green ceramic tile that I love! There's artwork on the walls, soft lighting throughout, and quiet music playing.
It's an intentionally beautiful environment that makes me feel calm and helps me be productive.
(of course the bottomless cup of coffee and yummy quiche help too :)
Environments make us think, feel, and be something.
They impact us deeply, whether we want them to or not. It isn't a question of if, but how.
Our connection to our environment is part of God's original design. Humans were made to exist and thrive is a specific environment that included some very beautiful attributes.
"Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed." Genesis 2:8.
God made a home for humanity in a place that was productive, comfortable, and altogether beautiful. Earth and the universe are God's masterful piece of artwork. It's ever shifting shadows, weather patterns, sunrises and sunsets, are all curated with love by God for us. This was His perfect design so that we could live and thrive in relationship with Him and with one-another. In this environment we are free to think, feel and exist in all kinds of ways that are completely good.
And Satan knows it.
He knows that our environments matter. He understands that our environments not only reflect unseen realities of the heart and mind, but they can direct them too.
This is why he works so hard to undermine, infiltrate, and corrupt the arts; because he knows that if he can do that, then peoples thoughts and feelings will follow.
His corruption knows no bounds where his evil hand is free to
steal the beauty of life that comes from the Kingdom of God.
In the gap of beauty he inserts ugliness, disorder, want, and death. His means and messages are overt and powerful. The result is cultures in decay; where hearts are embittered, confused, and grow numb.
Satan understands that environment matters. So, one of his weapons of choice is to corrupt the arts: design, literature, music, fine art, billboards, social media, commercials... these, and more, are the building blocks of our environments.
They are The Arts.
When we clearly see this part of the battle, it becomes our privilege and responsibility to take back ground; to enter the battle by bringing the Kingdom of God to earth through the power of the arts.
Don't you love it when you find out that something you love is actually good for you?!
My husband keeps coming home with tidbits of research proving that coffee and dark chocolate are good for us ;)
Perhaps you can consider this one of those moments; finding out that giving energy and resources, within your means, towards making your environments beautiful is one way you can resist the advancement of the Kingdom of darkness and be part of advancing the goodness of the Kingdom Light.
You can make your home, office and place of worship environments that when people enter them, the realities of the Kingdom of God are reflected, begotten, and reinforced in their hearts and minds.
You can fight the brokenness of the world and the agenda of the enemy with beauty.
It's a quiet battle, but it is powerful.
Jesus told us to pray and work towards this end, "His Kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven." Matthew 6:10
Blessings,
Melissa
melissajoymiller.com
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