Masterpiece

Picasso I am not. Neither can I hold a candle to Monet . How I would love to be able to paint a beautiful picture of a sunset or rolling hills with tall waving grass and flowers exploding everywhere. I wouldn't mind either being able to paint a picture of my kids when they're asleep and so very angelic looking! It just isn't meant to be though. That is not the gift that God has chosen to give me. So when I feel the need to be creative in some way, I have found another outlet. The walls of my home have become my canvas.

In a couple of the rooms I knew exactly the color that I wanted to paint. I painted one time and loved the color! The other rooms were a different story altogether. My house is older so it has a wall that separates the Living Room and my bedroom that is made out of brick. (I guess it's really true that they used to make houses much more sturdy than they do today! :o) ) At first the color scheme was to involve a color that is a cross between a maroon and brick red for the brick wall, and a tannish color to accent on the other walls. But then my friend and I were looking at some paint samples (she has 100's of them, so it can be very difficult to focus on just one color!) and I found a shade of green that I absolutely adored! It was called Pesto. As the accent color, we found a shade of very very light tan that seemed would be the perfect compliment to the Pesto. All seemed well until the whole brick wall was painted. My first clue that I made a bad choice was that when Tim came into the house, he took one look at the wall and said, "You really like that color?!?!". Let me, to my defense, just add that I did really like the color, but I wasn't looking at how it looked on my walls, I was looking at the color itself. Which was mistake # 1. Mistake # 2 came when my friend and I painted the accent color on the wall and realized that it made the green look even worse than it did on it's own. By the way, did I mention that a good part of my house has this wood planking on the walls? It is stained a rich brownish-red color, which is absolutely beautiful on the wood. However, I have found through much trial and tribulation that finding shades of paint that will go well with the aforementioned stain is not so easy to do!! Matter of fact, it has been downright exhausting!!! After taking a step back and surveying the damage of the green-scheme in my room, I decided to do what I should have done in the first place..... I went with the maroon/red brick and tan color scheme. And now my room looks beautiful!! Thank God! :o)

My next project was the Living Room. Bear in mind that the same brick wall that is in my room is also on the Living Room side. Until I began to paint this brick, I had no idea how much time and effort it would take just to paint one wall! And after the fiasco in my room, you would think that I would have learned to be certain that the color I was going to use would go well with the stain on the wood planking. But no, I didn't. My only test to see if the color would match was to hold the color card up to the wood. Well, we all know that what you see isn't always what you get. And let me tell you that I proved that not just one time, but two more times after that. Yeah, you heard me right..... Three times I painted that doggone Living Room with a color that ended up looking hideous. Actually one color was just to cover up a purple-ish color that I had picked out that ended up looking so putrid that I had to cover over it the very next day. I was up until 3 in the morning painting, and then about 6 hours later, I was back at it again to get rid of the evidence of my colossal mistake! By now I was becoming a pro at painting this brick! I guess if something good came out of this, my painting skills have improved immensely, and I am much faster as well. You know the saying, "the third time is the charm"? Well, obviously that was not the case in this room. But on the fourth try, I finally found a color that looked pretty good. Yeah! The funny thing is, the color is fairly light, so with the wood being so dark, you can hardly tell that I painted it! So now, I might just have to paint it again! Go figure!

All of this actually happened a few months ago, but I read some verses in my Bible last night that brought these memories back. Isaiah 43: 18 & 19 say, "Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland". Back at the beginning I mentioned that the walls of this house had become my canvas. When I painted and saw that the work was not what it should be, I started all over again. I began a new thing. And that is what God is doing with me. I am His canvas to create and design. And if what He sees in me is not what He knows is good, He too will begin a new thing in me. He is now, and I'm sure that this will happen quite often throughout my lifetime. And you know something? I am absolutely fine with that!!!! I am thankful even!! Because I don't want to stay the way that I am now! Then, someday when I am at home in heaven, God's masterpiece will finally be finished!