On scraping and mending

I was going through some things that I wrote a couple of years ago and came across this. I thought that it would be a great post at this time of year, so I made a few changes and here it is.

I have been refinishing an old rocking chair that at one time belonged to my children's great grandmother. Grandma used this wooden chair as an outside rocker when she wanted to sit on her porch. I have no idea how many years this chair sat on her porch, but it was there for at least 23 years that I know of before we inherited it.

The chair was white and the paint was beginning to peel, so I decided it could use a good makeover and go into my newly redecorated living room. I took it out to the garage, spread a tarp on the ground and sprayed the chair with paint remover. I then proceeded to scrape the old white paint from the rocker, hoping to reveal a chair ready to be made beautiful again. I also needed to take the leather seat off and replace that because it had been painted white along with the chair. When I got the majority of the paint scraped, I proceeded to lift the leather off. Imagine my surprise when I realized that the seat was not made of leather, but several layers of heavy roofing paper painted white!! Not only that, but the wood in the chair was not pretty and waiting to be restored. No, it's many years outside made it full of holes and pitts and it was even starting to rot in places.

This chair was going to take more work than I had planned on and even then, I didn't know if I could make it look pretty again.I took as much paint off as I could and then I sanded off even more. I then filled what holes I could with wood filler/patcher and sanded some more. I took it out to the lawn and washed it and left it in the sun to dry. I tightened screws and hammered nails back in place. I sanded some more and found places that the paint had not been removed, so I removed what I could.

There came a point that I could not smooth out all of the pock marks and pits. To do so would result in me sanding away wood and the integrity of the chair would be compromised, so I had to content myself with what I had done. I then painted the chair the lovely red I had chosen for it. It looks nice, if you view it from across the room, however on close inspection you will see that there are still places where it is pitted and pockmarked and weathered wood painted to look nice.

Sometimes our lives are like this. We look good on the outside, but the foundation and prepartation are not what they could or should be.

When you get your new year/new start, you are excited and thrilled to receive it. You tell a few friends and family members about your new venture and then you sit back and wait for the results to come in. But they don't, and you get discouraged and you realize that this is going to be a bit more work than you planned on. How your "finished" product turns out is up to what you do now.

Do you throw in the towel and give up or do you do everything you can to make it work? There will probably come a time that you have done all that you can and you will not be able to smooth out all of the pock marks and pits. This is where the Lord steps in to tighten the screws and nails so to speak. He can sand and smooth without compromising the integrity of our soul. In fact, He can use more than wood filler to mend our lives.

And when He is done, you look up and your life has turned into what you wanted it to be, pretty and beautiful and productive- not just from across the room, but up close as well.

---

Indeed.