My NEW Cozy Minimalist Living Room & Kitchen Makeover _ Designing My Hooga Home - Part 3

What a wild year it's been for the world .

I hope you're all doing better mentally and emotionally these days .

Remember that no matter how hopeless or chaotic things might get , God is always in control .

He's heard your prayers and he knows what he's doing , just trust his process .

Now , let's get started .

This is the third part of the designing my Hua Home series .

Everything featured in this video is linked in my description below .

When I thought about the factors that make for a cozy and peaceful home .

The common denominator was always intentionality .

It takes a lot of work to create a cozy home and it takes facing adversity in order to make a peaceful space .

Over the weekend , I heard Pastor Anthony Miller say that there's a difference between peacekeeping and peacemaking .

As Christians , we are called to be peacemakers and the element of peace often comes right after or right in the middle of a storm .

People don't usually crave peace until they know the misery of living without it .

So in order to create a Hua home that's full of peace , harmony and coziness , we must be intentional with putting in the physical and emotional work to make it happen .

And most of the time tackling adversity head on can be very triggering and exhausting .

But trust me , the work is always worth it .

One blind spot that I've always had as a home stylist is that I tended to prefer form over function .

This is why it took me so long in my career to fully embrace minimalism .

The truth is that busy looking spaces with a lot of beautiful impractical decor tend to perform better on Instagram .

People love looking at photos of spectacular homes filled with impractical creative decor .

So for the longest time , I felt like in order to succeed in my niche , I needed to make sure that my home was beautiful , not functional .

And as a result , I felt like my home was my work studio , not a sanctuary where I can wind down and relax .

It's funny how prioritizing form over function can have such unfortunate consequences .

I can't help but think about the current state of my country and the civil unrest that we're experiencing right now .

Centuries of pain and violence inflicted on black bodies finally culminated in a passionate modern day civil rights movement .

America prides itself in being the greatest country in the world and it has its brilliant and excellent achievements to prove it .

However , we can boast about our form all day long .

But with our own people being treated with violence and being born with social disadvantages just because of the color of our skin .

We have to rethink our functionality in a book called Between the World and me , Ta Nehisi Coates wrote America makes no claim to the banal America believes itself exceptional .

The greatest and nobles nation ever to exist .

A lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists despots , barbarians and other enemies of civilization .

One cannot at once claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error .

I propose to take our countryman's claims of American exceptionalism seriously , which is to say , I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard .

This is difficult because there exists all around us , an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much .

Some of you might be thinking , why is she talking about politics and racism when I'm here to watch a video about furniture and to that , I say welcome to my channel where every video is a devotional video even though it shows the day to day of my life because whether I'm eating or sleeping , styling my home or gardening , I do it all for the glory of God .

And this time as I prepared to talk about how to design a home , I was led to talk about my greater home , my country in this greater home of mine .

I have brothers and sisters of all ethnicities and we each play our part to try to make our home .

Not only beautiful but functional .

So when there is dysfunction , it's not just on one of us to fix it , but on all of us , we are called to be peacemakers , warriors of peace against the ways of adversity .

We need to brave the discomfort , the exhaustion and the inconvenience to make way for a truly functional , peaceful and cozy home for us all .