Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

by Christie Purifoy

Overview

Placemaker is a call to tend our souls, our land, and our homes--to cultivate comfort, beauty, and peace in the places God has us.

Images of comfortable kitchens and flower-filled gardens stir something deep within us--we instinctively long for home. In a world of chaos and conflict, we want a place of comfort and peace.

In Placemaker, Christie Purifoy invites us to notice our soul's desire for beauty, our need to create and to be created again and again. As she reflects on the joys and sorrows of two decades as a placemaker and her recent years living in and restoring a Pennsylvania farmhouse, Christie shows us that we are all gardeners. No matter our vocation, we spend much of our lives tending, keeping, and caring. In each act of creation, we reflect the image of God. In each moment of making beauty, we realize that beauty is a mystery to receive.

Weaving together her family's journey with stories of botanical marvels and the histories of the flawed yet inspiring placemakers who shaped the land generations ago, Christie calls us to cultivate orchards and communities, to clap our hands along with the trees of the fields, to step into our calling to create, to make a place in the place God made for us. 

Placemaker is a timely yet timeless reminder that the cultivation of good and beautiful places is not a retreat from the real world but a holy pursuit of a world that is more real than we know.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780310352259
Publisher:	Zondervan
Publication date:	03/12/2019
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishing
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	476,077
File size:	578 KB

About the Author

Christie Purifoy earned a PhD in English Literature at the University of Chicago before trading the classroom for an old farmhouse, a garden, and a writing desk. She is the author of Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons and lives with her husband and four children at Maplehurst, a Victorian farmhouse in southeastern Pennsylvania. Her lyrical reflections can be found at christiepurifoy.com.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Forests and Orchards: Our Invitation to Live as Placemakers 7

Chapter 1 Citrus Grove; Receiving the Gift of Limits 15

Chapter 2 Pine Tree: Choosing to Want 28

Chapter 3 Saucer Magnolia: Listening to a Place 45

Chapter 4 Honey Locust: Gaining and Losing the City 64

Chapter 5 Perms Woods: The Abundance of Empty Places 83

Chapter 6 Old-Growth Forest: How to Be a Neighbor 99

Chapter 7 Queen Palm: Letting Go of a Former Home 120

Chapter 8 Crape Myrtle and Chestnut: Searching for a New Home 135

Chapter 9 Silver Maple: The Price of a Place 152

Chapter 10 Norway Maple: Placemaking around the Table 168

Chapter 11 Rainbow Eucalyptus and Roses: A Place for Those Who Mourn 184

Chapter 12 Arboretum: The Place Where We Cultivate Peace 201

Acknowledgments 217

Notes 219