Building a Blue House.

Hey, welcome! If anyone other than my mom is reading this, I’m Melissa. You may be here because you have some vague memory of a Blue House Blog from decades past… but probably not. I never was The Pioneer Woman, though I really, really wanted to be. 

For those of you who aren’t my mom (and I can always count on my mom to read everything I write … thank you, mom) and somehow stumbled here, here’s where you are: I started this blog in 2006 when I had just bought what I thought was going to be my forever home, an old blue colonial built in 1928 that had been sitting there crumbling and NEEDED me to bring it back to life. (We needed each other, really).

I started a blog to document the projects. It turned into a blog about life and Jesus and food and healing a brain tumor. 

Sooooo things didn’t turn out like I planned back in 2006 when I was a lot naiver than I am today… I sold the Blue House in 2010, very much against my wishes. I was forced. It broke my heart. Yada yada yada. The life and home I tried so carefully to put together came apart. That’s the Cliff’s Notes version. 

The blog continued for a while, though, stumbling along clumsily, without direction or purpose. 

And then a lot of life and hits kept happening. The spiritual metaphor behind the scenes of it all is that I was put into the furnace, and then put into the furnace again. From my BSF lesson this week, “When both the dross and the gold are put into the furnace, the dross burns off, but the gold comes out purified.”

I like to think that the author of this blog in 2024 is a much more mature and refined version of the one in 2006.

Maybe not quite purified gold exactly, or even close, but a whole lot of dross has burned off. 

I look back at some of the things I wrote back in those days and cringe. Just… yuck. How goofy and immature I was. And how the hills I would have died on in those days aren’t the hills I would die on today. 

I still love to write, though, and I still love to tell stories, and share what I’ve learned, and most of all I love to tell a story that makes people laugh. That is my love language. That is what God created me to do, and I say that with the confidence of someone who has spent the last eighteen years since the beginnings of this blog trying to figure that out. 

But for most part, I’ve believed the lies of the enemy that convinced me I didn’t have anything worthwhile to say, nobody was reading it and if they were they were mocking me, because I was a loser who had made a giant mess of everything. 

So I just hid. 

(Isn’t that just like the enemy, though? He wants to silence us all. Words are powerful, he knows it, and he wants us silenced. More on that later). 

I have debated whether I should scrap the Blue House Blog and start over with a new name. I don’t even own a Blue House anymore, it’s a yellow house, but it isn’t going to stay yellow forever, and what exactly should I be doing here in this space?

Home decor? Old house DIY? Brain tumor? Jesus? All or none of the above?

Do I have to own a blue house to have a Blue House blog? 

Turns out, “blue” can mean a lot of things. 

From psychology: blue is a sign of introspective journeys, wisdom and depth of understanding. 

From art: blue is associated with water, the sky and infinity; serenity, calm and spirituality.

From a mood ring: the wearer is feeling calm, relaxed, and peaceful. 

From feng shui: calming, peaceful energy; movement and an abundance of water. 

From the Bible: blue means heavens and the Word of God; God’s Holiness, Righteousness, and Majesty. 

“True Blue” means faithful, loyal, and authentic. 

Ah, yes. I want my home, my life and my blog to be about all of those things.

So welcome back. It’s time to build a new blue house.