Decorating our Lives

When I was a child, I grew up with a hammer in one hand and a staple gun in the other. 

My parents, Henry Erwin and Lena Mills Bridges owned a professional parade float business called 

Universal Decorators.  

While our travels weren’t “universal” we did travel all over the south of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s providing beautiful floats in festivals stretching from Virginia to Alabama. One newspaper described my Daddy as an “architect of dreams.”

My Mother told stories about boarding a train when I was just a baby leaving from Raleigh, NC where we lived at the time to meet up with Daddy. Each year, he furnished floats for the Hampton Watermelon Festival in South Carolina which began in the 1940s. Growing up, we spent 2-3 weeks there every summer where my younger sister and I played and worked on the floats.   

Bare bones of the Miss America Float 1956

It was a wonderful setting not only for our imaginations but to learn our parents’ dedicated, entrepreneurial work ethic early on. The Watermelon Festival was the biggest event of the year in that rural part of South Carolina and usually featured 25 of our floats. 

My younger sister and I learned early to wield a hammer and to staple fringe, festooning, foil, and floral sheeting on floats featuring swans, toy houses, a little train with a caboose, and other fanciful themes.   

You may ask, what does decorating parade floats have to do with decorating our lives? 

When Mother and Daddy designed a parade float, they began with raw wood and architectural ideas. They built a sturdy frame which had to withstand the rigors of the road from town to town; unadorned, only wood, nails, and bolts set on top of a steel frame with a trailer tongue. Not very attractive. 

The raw foundation took shape over days and weeks. Sometimes a nail didn’t go in straight or a piece of wood wasn’t measured correctly. The foundation had to be just right and sometimes changed or reworked.  

In the meantime, many boxes of decorating materials arrived by train from a Florida manufacturing company.  It was like Christmas to open the boxes and pull out the rainbow colors from an array of decorative materials.  That’s when the staple guns went to work, affixing the bright materials onto the wood and steel frame creating a float to delight the eyes of thousands of children and adults alike.

In our walk with the Lord, He begins with raw materials too, laying a foundation for our faith. Our Master Decorator sometimes rearranges and/or changes our lives. All the while He is "decorating" us inside with His spirit as He builds us into an outward reflection of His love.  

Just like the sturdy underpinning of my parents pride and joy, the Miss America float, Jesus changes our lives into one of faith and action as part of His family. 
Bless Others With Beauty From Inside Out

Miss America float finished

1 Kings 6:37 “In the fourth year the foundation of the house of the LORD was laid, in the month of Ziv.”  
Matthew 7:24-27   "Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock.” Jesus 
1 Corinthians 3:10 “According to the grace of God which was given to me, like a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another is building on it. But each man must be careful how he builds on it.” Apostle Paul