An Ordinary Life

That Was Anything But

For most of my life, all I wanted was to be ordinary.

That probably sounds strange coming from someone who grew up in the Lear family in Las Vegas.

There was nothing particularly ordinary about my childhood. My grandfather was Bill Lear. The Learjet name opened doors before I was old enough to understand why doors were opening. There was money, recognition, extraordinary people and extraordinary places. There was an unspoken understanding that our family was different.

Maybe even better.

We were taught how to behave accordingly. Summer camp was Etiquette School.

And I hated it.

Not my family. Not the opportunities or experiences I was fortunate enough to have. I simply hated the idea that any of it made us more important than anyone else. Something about it never felt right to me.

While other people might have looked at my life and seen privilege, I remember looking at other families and wanting what they had.

I wanted a picket fence. I wanted a mom making dinner and everybody knowing what time to come home. I wanted people sitting around a table talking about their day. I wanted traditions that weren't performances and gatherings that weren't about who was invited.

I wanted normalcy.

I wanted an ordinary family.

My mother wanted something very different.

She loved beautiful things, interesting people and a certain kind of life. Eventually, we moved into her dream home on Sunrise Mountain overlooking Las Vegas. It was spectacular. And in many ways, I think it represented everything she had been trying to create.

It was also the place where she finally felt she could really entertain.

And she did.

From the outside, it probably looked like hospitality. Beautiful home, beautiful view, interesting guests. Everything just so.

But even then, something about it felt artificial to me.

I didn't have the language for it as a child. I couldn't have explained the difference between entertaining and hospitality, or between having people in your home and actually making people feel at home.

I only knew how it felt.

Contrived.

There seemed to be so much emphasis on how things appeared—our family, our homes, our lives, even ourselves.

My sister and I joke that, given the opportunity and the right era, my mother would happily have turned us into Kardashians or married us off to Arabian sheikhs.

I wanted absolutely none of it. I didn't want to be famous or have an extraordinary life.

I wanted a genuine one.

A husband I loved. Children. A home. Dinner around a table. Friends who could walk through the door without knocking. Enough land for kids to run around on. A place where people didn't have to impress one another.

I wanted the simple joy of a good life.

And eventually, I thought I'd found it.

I married. We had children. We made a home. We bought the house next door to the place where my husband grew up and began the long process of making it ours. We raised our family on land connected to generations before us.

There were birthday parties and cookouts, fall festivals and bonfires, Fourth of July celebrations and New Year's Eves. Kids ran through the yard. Friends gathered in the kitchen. Projects took twice as long and cost twice as much as we expected.

There was mess and laughter and ordinary life.

And I loved it.

Somewhere along the way, without realizing it, I had built almost exactly what that little girl in Las Vegas had wanted.

I had the family, the house, the land and the table.

I had ordinary.

And I thought that meant I had arrived.

Then came 2020.

I don't know that I will ever be able to explain that season of my life in a few paragraphs. Maybe I'm not supposed to.

But I can tell you what I understand about it now.

God shattered what I thought I had built.

And for a while, I couldn't understand why.

I had spent my life trying to get here—trying to build something different from what I had known, trying to create the kind of family and home and life I had craved since childhood.

Wasn't this what I was supposed to want? Wasn't this the good life?

What I couldn't see yet was that God wasn't taking the good things away from me.

He was showing me what they were standing on.

I had spent years building the life around me without understanding what needed to be built within me.

The house wasn't the foundation. The land wasn't the foundation. My marriage wasn't the foundation. My children weren't the foundation. Tradition wasn't the foundation. Even family wasn't strong enough to carry the weight I had unknowingly placed upon it.

Only He was.

And once I understood that, I began to see my ordinary life differently.

God hadn't overlooked me or given somebody else the extraordinary story while handing me the quiet one. He had already given me nearly everything I had spent my life wanting.

I just hadn't understood the gift.

And when the foundation beneath it proved unable to hold, He didn't abandon the house.

He rebuilt it.

He rebuilt me.

He changed what we believed and what we valued. He changed how I understood family and home and purpose. He changed the way I looked at this land and the people who walk onto it.

He changed what hospitality meant to me.

Hospitality, I understand now, isn't having a home impressive enough to invite people into. It isn't the right dishes or a perfectly set table. It isn't a spectacular view over Las Vegas, entertaining important people, or even making everything beautiful before somebody arrives.

Hospitality is making room.

Sometimes that means literally making room. Sometimes it's making room in your schedule or at your table.

Sometimes it's making room in your car for a mother and two little children who need somewhere to go. Sometimes it's letting children pick muscadines from your vines and feed the fish in your pond.

Sometimes it's sitting long enough for someone to tell you what she believes and listening without needing to prove what you believe.

Sometimes it's feeding people or laughing with them.

And sometimes it's simply letting someone know:

There is room for you here.

Perhaps that is why this idea of home has followed me for my entire life.

I used to think I was searching for a place. Then I thought I was trying to create one. Now I think I was searching for something much deeper—belonging, truth, peace, joy. A life that didn't need to be performed for anyone else.

And ultimately, God.

That is where Better Within really begins.

The name meant something to me before I fully understood why. At first, I thought I was creating a place to share our home—the things we've built, the rooms we've changed, the projects we've tackled, the things I've found and loved along the way.

And those things are still part of it.

But somewhere along the way, Better Within began to mean something more.

I love making a home beautiful. I love finding something at Goodwill for ten dollars that makes a room better. I love rearranging furniture until my husband wonders if I've lost my mind. I love feeding people and setting a table and figuring out how to make one more person fit.

But I know now that none of those things make a home.

They simply give us places in which to live out what does.

Maybe that is the story I've been trying to tell all along.

A girl who grew up surrounded by extraordinary things and spent her life wishing for ordinary ones. A woman who eventually got the ordinary life she'd dreamed about. And a God who loved her enough to show her that even the life she'd always wanted could never be the foundation beneath her.

He was.

Everything else—the house, the land, the family, the table, the friendships, the laughter—is a gift.

And perhaps that's why this ordinary life brings me more joy today than I ever imagined it could.

Because it turns out—

it was anything but.