At the start of my GreenHouse journey, I knew my dream would involve life-giving creativity, connectedness, and healing, but I had so many potential callings and creative ideas that I felt overwhelmed by the prospect of choosing one thing to focus on. Beneath that was a deeper question of identity: Who am I? By what dreams, pursuits, or habits can I define myself? How can I consolidate all these parts of myself into one dream I can name and understand?
I have always enjoyed a variety of creative pursuits—singing, songwriting, gardening, ballroom dance and choreography, piano, painting, acting, floral design, and interior design. As someone wired for emotional connection, depth, and empathy, I also found a home in the calling of couples and sex therapy, which I am currently studying at Richmont. Because of this, I often felt fragmented. I longed to see all the elements of my identity, gifts, and callings woven together into something coherent.
As the GreenHouse journey progressed, this yearning was validated and prayed over by the three other individuals in our listening pod. Through their encouragement, I began to see that my connectivity and diverse passions were not necessarily a problem to solve. Perhaps I did not have to be just one type of person in order to be an integrated, whole human being.
My journey continued as I prayerfully began saying yes to the pursuits that seemed to bring life, albeit in seemingly small ways. I moved toward one idea at a time and held each with open hands, gradually letting go of the false expectation that I would discover a concrete goal and a linear path to my dream. That simply is not how my brain works.
I love music and songwriting, as well as acting and theatre, and it used to trouble me that I had not made them the primary focus of my life, despite my love for them, as though that somehow made me an illegitimate creative. During this journey, I took the risk of sitting at my piano and writing from a place of inspiration rather than obligation. The song did not have to become anything. It did not have to grow into a songwriting career or a finished album. It was enough that I sat at my piano and wrote. In that process, something in me healed. The pressure lifted, and I was able to communicate what I honestly felt through music. I think that song is probably one of the better ones I have written.
I also applied to a few florist positions because of my love for floral design and began making frequent trips to florists simply for the joy of creating bouquets for my home. I choreographed a couple’s first dance for their wedding—one they loved and felt captured their relationship. I auditioned for a play to see if I could try out acting again.
At first, these efforts felt spread out and sporadic, but over time the data points began to paint a picture: I was already doing what I wanted to do. My dream of wholeness and of regaining and weaving together the parts of myself I’ve dropped along the way was beginning to take place. In a pragmatic sense, none of these pursuits led to a grand career, financial success, or public affirmation of my dream. But more deeply, each step was an act of faith and movement. Each effort contained the whole journey in miniature because each one required me to create, explore, and participate without knowing the outcome.
This realization eventually led me to the idea of play.
As a future couples therapist, I cannot help but see life through the lens of relationships and attachment. One sign of a child’s secure attachment to a parent is playfulness and exploration. A child who trusts that her parent will care for her and remain present is free to explore, create, and engage the world with curiosity because her need for safety has been met.
Looking back, I realize this journey has been, in part, about healing playfulness in me, maybe especially as I continue to grow a more secure attachment to the Triune God.
As a child, my favorite Disney character was Tinker Bell—a creative, handy fairy who could make wonderful things out of odds and ends. Her creations enriched her life and the lives of those around her. (Her name was always my username on gaming sites growing up, which represented how I identified with her.) I loved arts and crafts and identified with her vision for making something whole out of bits and pieces that otherwise seemed unrelated. There is something about that image that speaks to playfulness and exploration born out of safety. There is also something about it that reflects the nature of God as Creator.
In Genesis 1, God forms a world out of what is formless and chaotic. He creates beauty, order, and meaning where there was none. That sort of creative power has always drawn me. Through the insight of a pod member (and fellow Enneagram Four), I began naming what first seemed like sporadic efforts as tinkering. As I tinkered and freely allowed myself to touch many beloved pursuits, I was creating without performing–without needing results to justify the act. Far from being a waste, each effort became an act of restoration and fueled me onward to keep creating and bringing life and newness to the spaces around me, like a wildflower field that begins with one regenerative seed.
This mirrored my own continuing journey in therapy as I began EMDR this spring. EMDR is specifically designed to help integrate and process memories that have not been fully consolidated, allowing a person to move toward greater wholeness and healing. As I reflected on this process, I realized that integration (a word I use to describe the unity and wholeness of seemingly separate ideas or experiences), beauty, and the proclamation of goodness as a deeper truth than darkness seemed to be the common threads running through all my pursuits.
Every bouquet I make is an united whole of many distinct flowers. Each flower is beautiful on its own, but when brought together, something new and even more beautiful emerges.
A partnered ballroom dance choreographs many disjointed steps into something meaningful—a bodily expression between two people that tells a story.
My calling as a therapist is one of integrating story: helping people understand their experiences and helping couples move toward greater connection and unity.
Music is a world created out of notes, chords, rhythms, and words into a melody, a story that communicates meaning.
Acting is the embodiment and reflection of the story of another person as a coherent whole—and the temporary unity of one’s story with a character.
Even writing itself is an act of integration, and perhaps one of the most difficult. Language gathers abstract thoughts, experiences, and fragments of meaning into something that can be shared and understood.
Loam, GreenHouse’s AI, further helped me articulate this realization. I began naming my dream as one of creating wholeness out of brokenness through the creative act of making experiences and spaces where people can breathe, let down their defenses, name their pain, and bask in goodness and beauty.
Perhaps, ironically, this has always been present in my seemingly sporadic endeavors.
Every calling or short-lived effort I once dismissed has integration, creativity, and restoration woven into it. In that sense, my dream was realized as I came into that truth more confidently. I already reflect the image of God. Like Adam and Eve in the garden, I do not have to strive to become like Him. That was already His intention in creating me, and all his image bearers.
As I conclude this journey and reflect on what I am taking away, I realize that I already am an integrated whole whom God has designed and approved of. He made me with all these separate passions and interests, yet my deepest calling is simply to be—to reflect Him in the aspects of my being that delight me and delight Him, without pressure or the need to prove myself.
So perhaps my calling does have a name—the one He gave me.
Furthermore, I think another part of this journey has been learning that goodness does not always need to be earned or justified. A song does not need to become a career to matter. A bouquet does not need to generate income to be beautiful. Delight itself has value. My delight, in fact, has great value to God.
Perhaps He made me to tinker.
To play, with Him.
To flit through the garden He is restoring, bringing beauty and newness wherever I can as an outpouring of my presence, rather than a justification for it—just like He bestows so many different kinds of life and restoration onto His children but is satisfied and whole in His relational, triune self.
Perhaps He made me to write songs, choreograph dances, sing, plant gardens, arrange flowers, decorate spaces, weep with those who weep, name the truth of suffering, and defiantly proclaim the deeper truths of goodness and beauty—without any of it needing to be seen in order to be real. I do not have to prove to the world—or even to myself—that I deserve the name “creative.” It is enough to participate in God’s creative work with open hands.
Lauren is part of the 2026 GreenHouse Cohort.