Jesus wants to de-stress what distresses us!

Wednesday Word

She looked at the finished product and felt a sense of accomplishment.  She couldn’t believe how far she had come in the last several months, and never in a million years did she see herself stripping a house and starting from the floor up and making it into a home, her home.

Thanks for joining us for Wednesday’s Word with Kim-Evinda and Trench Classes United. Today’s blog is a great example of how God shows up unexpected in the unexpected. 😊

“You can’t put those old doors back on!” Her girlfriend said to her as they were painting the trim in the halls for each doorway. “Yeah, you’re right,” I commented, “but I just can’t see paying a couple hundred for each door and then another couple hundred each to hang them.”

She remembered a project she and her then husband had done a few years ago, a sort of renewing, refurbishing project of distressing their laminate cabinets in the laundry room to make give them a vintage-like look with the hope of changing their appearance. She smiled as she remembered how she just sort of jumped into the project without doing a whole lot of research; nor did she like to do any of the prep work. But he, her then husband, didn’t mind doing all of that. The memory brought tears to her eyes; it all still stung so bad.

Evidently the pain fueled her with just what she needed. Within a week, she was attempting to turn a plain door into something different, completely different.

It was a eight-step process, which included wiping down the door to make sure there was no residue of any kind, cut squares of Wayne’s coating into smaller squares as accents, glue them on the door, frame them with some sort of trim (that was the hardest part, making those darn corners fit), paint with a primer-based paint, paint with color, then sand to distress, then glaze/stain and wipe. 

It sounds sort of easy, but it was tricky as the doors aren’t wood, which is why it required primer paint first, and then regular paint. The distressing was de-stressing, and the staining is where the art comes in. Sometimes it takes doing and undoing, learning, and re-doing.

Oh, how I am much like these doors, and maybe you are too. We may have a smooth finish on the outside, but when trials and tragedies hit, what is inside of us will eventually come out and distress us and what distresses us interferes with our ability to live a faith-filled life and requires a bit of work, like my old doors.

Jesus wants to de-stress what distresses us!

Jesus needs to take that sander, maybe even a scraping tool, peel back the layers, reveal the issues, the blockages that interfere with His original design for us and in us and then seal it back up with His amazing grace and healing love…thereafter imprinting a new design, a design which includes a coat of love and joy, peace and patience, and then a coat of kindness, goodness and gentleness and finally, the glaze of self-control.

He will stop at nothing to infuse us with these gifts. His ways are not our ways and His love is relentless, and though the process hurts a lot of the time, the finished product, aka, that part of our life, beholds His artwork, glazed with the beauty of His grace.
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Incidentally, I wound up redoing EVERY door in my new home and oh, what a feeling! 😊

In His artistic grip
Kim-Evinda