Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Paint and sin

I spent days and days cleaning before my mom and sister got here for their visit. We even did some long overdue painting. Long overdue would mean about 3 years overdue. Now that it's done, can I tell you how much painting reminds me of dealing with sin? Yep. It sure does.

See, it all started with the living and dining room. We were just going to paint in there. No new color, just the same one. It's flat paint so if you try to clean it, it just comes off, leaving you with bare, unpainted walls. No thanks! So we painted.

Then we saw that the dirt on the foyer wall was really obvious now that the adjacent living and dining room walls were freshly painted and clean. So we felt we had to do the foyer. Of course, once we did that, the kitchen walls looked bad. So we did the kitchen.

And we thought we'd be done...except that the foyer walls also made the stairway walls look trashy. So...yes, you guessed it...we continued to paint. And we did this until every room was painted.

When we were done it all looked so nice and new, like we had never had dirty little hand prints on the wall. And that's when it hit me. If we start dealing with one area of sin in our life and we allow God to really clean us up in regards to that one issue, it's great. The problem (or great thing) is that our pleasure at God winning a battle for us in that area is tempered by the sudden realization that there's still this one other issue that we need His help with. And once we're doing good there, we realize that there's that other issue over there, hiding out behind the guilt and shame.

Just like my husband and I could not paint just the one wall, it's hard to just ask God to deal with one thing and say "Okay, I'm good. I'm done now." Even if we do, we'll keep looking at that clean area next to the the unclean one and it will bother us to action. And you know what? I like that.

So I say today, "God, paint on. Remodel! Have at it!" Will you join me?

As always be blessed! I'm off to help my mom reclean all the things I already cleaned before she got here. LOL

1 comment:

Danielle said...

Oh, how true this is! Most of our house is white on the inside and not too long ago, I decided to just take some primer and fix a couple spots where hand prints and smudges were left... 4 hrs later, I was finished. AH!