The walls come tumbling down: Life lessons from building gingerbread houses
I hope you have had a good start to 2025. If Christmas already seems a distant memory; you’re eager for longer daylight hours, warmer weather and have dragged yourself through January by researching your next summer holiday destination, then this blog topic may seem a little out-of-season. Bear with: all will become clear.
One of the things my family likes to do over the festive season is build and decorate gingerbread houses. We purchase flat pack kits of miniature ones, so that we can all build our own. It can often get quite competitive as to who can get their walls to stay standing first, or be most successful at getting the decorations to remain stuck to the roof. Results, as I’m sure you can imagine, vary significantly! The sense of despair is real when you’re just about to stick the roof on and the side wall collapses; or when the neatly aligned, colour-coordinated jelly sweets unceremoniously slide down from gable to guttering! Likewise, the sense of achievement when you successfully manage to get the decorations placed exactly as you envisaged is a heady feeling indeed.
Holding the walls together
Can you guess where this analogy is going? Restore’s ‘providing homes, giving hope’ strapline sums up in a nutshell the work we do with and among our residents (that is, after all, what a strapline is for). It’s not dissimilar to the gingerbread houses: when everything has come crashing down, we are there to help someone pick up the pieces and to provide a safe place for them to live whilst they rebuild their lives. Our job is to offer support until they reach the point where they can stand on their own. In gingerbread-building terms, Restore is the hand, holding the walls together until the icing dries.
Just the right amount of pressure
As any gingerbread house aficionado knows, getting the four walls to remain standing is only the first of the problems! Next comes getting the roof to stay in place, and if you thought the walls were tricky: well, you’re in for a real treat! Even if you manage to get the icing in the correct place so that it actually joins the roof to the top of the walls, you still have to use just the right amount of icing so that it sticks together firmly, without leaking excess all over your existing structure. Then you have to place the two roof pieces at exactly the correct angle, to get them to meet in the middle to form the apex, then use icing to glue along the ridge line. Finally, you have to hold the whole thing together with enough pressure to ensure the two roof pieces stick to each other and the walls below, but not too much pressure so that everything collapses in on itself and means you have to start the entire building process all over again.
Knowing how much pressure to apply can be a tricky conundrum for our housing support team when it comes to our residents, too. Trying to get somebody to do something you know will be good for them, when they are reluctant/anxious/uncertain is a delicate operation: whether it be attending a budgeting course, applying for work, opening a bank account or building their connection to community by attending social hubs, too much pressure can do more harm than good. Our housing support team are adept at helping residents identify their own goals, and then supporting them to work towards those targets in manageable chunks. By way of gentle encouragement and establishing realistic expectations, we are able to help people rebuild their lives in a manageable way that is underpinned with good groundwork. Both in terms of restoring lives and building gingerbread houses, it is always best to ensure your foundations are solid, before attempting to build on top of them! When we help our residents establish these firm foundations, we know we are giving them the best chance of leaving homelessness behind them for good. Just as with a gingerbread house, it’s only once you’ve got the basic structure erected that you can start to add the decoration, so with our residents, it’s once they have the fundamentals in place that they can start to see what life could look like for them moving forwards.
The benefit of collaboration
More often than not when my family build gingerbread houses, what starts out as everyone building their own gingerbread construction becomes a collaborative affair: the calls of ‘please can you hold this in place for me whilst I ice this part?’ or ‘I need an extra pair of hands to help me stick this bit to that bit,’ mean that everyone’s gingerbread house is no longer a solo project, but rather the result of team work and cooperation. And so it is with our residents as well. It’s not just the resident and their housing support worker involved in the ‘reconstruction’ process: it’s the wider staff team at Restore; the resident’s housemates; other Restore residents, and the individual’s wider social circle. There are numerous platitudes that speak to the importance of community: ‘no man is an island,’ or ‘it takes a village to raise a child.’ Even God Himself said of Adam in the Garden of Eden ‘it is not good for man to be alone,’ (Genesis 2:18[2]) and so created Eve. Humans are at our most effective when we are united, and when we help each other along life’s path. It is to this end that we established our community hubs, operating out of various York churches throughout the week, to provide Restore residents past and present with a space to meet together and support one another, building bonds and friendships that allow for mutual encouragement, advice, support and comfort.
The cornerstone
Of course, for Christians, the idea of God building a house is a familiar metaphor. In the New Testament, Jesus is sometimes described as “the chief cornerstone.” (Ephesians 2:20) The cornerstone is the key foundation in a building project; the one upon which everything else is built. Thus, for Christians, Jesus is the fundamental basis for everything: it is Him on whom we build our lives, our hopes and our attitudes. At Restore, we work with people who find themselves on the fringes of society, precisely because the Bible calls us to demonstrate God’s love and compassion to a world in need. We believe that when a life has Christ at its foundation, this is the best basis on which to build everything else.
To find out more about the work of Restore please: