The Cracks in My Walls 11/4/2019
Rev. Karen Fitz La Barge
I have been doing a lot of painting lately, the painting of walls. Over the last several weeks, I have been immersed in French Colony, a sophisticated grey-blue. I have stirred up two cans of Sand Castle, a creamy latte tan and I have painted trim in a custom white color that is actually very close in tonality to Polar Bear. The boldest color in the palette though was Aqua Fresca, a very striking turquoise that was inspired by someone either gazing over the Caribbean seas or captivated by the rich tones in the most exquisite piece of Native American jewelry.
But even as I spread these lovely colors on my paint trays, rollers, brushes, hair and shoes; I did also manage to apply most of it to the walls, which was of course, my primary goal. –But that did not mean that everything I painted turned out picture perfect. No matter how many times that I painted over it, the cracks in the walls could not be healed by my careful application of paint. There was definitely a gap there, and even though I hoped that my well loaded paint roller could hide the glaring emptiness, no matter how many times that I went back over the spot, it would still be a crack in the wall, a wicked long black line that anyone with eyes could see. –It reminded me of the broken relationships in my life, the people that I had separated from over the years. There are folks from my past that I have never been able to reconcile with. And those old wounds, like the cracks in the walls, are still very visible if you look in the right places.
There were other places too where my walls bore witness to my poor attempts at a slip shod repair job. In those places, while the paint did not fall away into a gap, it did however highlight in bright tones the bumps and the ridges of the scars that remained after I badly tried to fix relationships that were broken. My faults were not glaring, but they were not very pretty either, and even two coats of paint did not hide those mistakes of my past from clearly showing up in the middle of the wall.
The most wonderful section of the walls however, where those who were repaired or completely replaced by the Master Craftsman. In those places in the house of my soul, expert hands with eternal scars had taken away all of the troubling broken pieces and had smoothed away all the faults and ridges. Those huge new sections of drywall soaked up the primer and the paint like a child soaks up love. In those places, the colors on the walls were simply beautiful. They softly reflected the light in all of their semi-gloss glory. Those walls were not only made whole, they were made new. The beauty of the colors, both sophisticated and strikingly bold all shone in the way that they were designed to. It was a spectacular thing to see.
In the evenings, as I rinsed out my brushes and hammered shut the paint cans, I gave thanks to God for all of the gifts that I had been given and for the beauty and the joy that comes from a job well done. But most of all, I was grateful for Jesus, the Master Craftsman who patiently patches me up again and again and who offers to fix all the deepest cracks in my life that I have so stubbornly try to paint over and ignore. He comes and stands there, with his tools in his hands and with love in his eyes, asking me gently if I am now finally ready for him fix those ugly spots in my walls that he definitely already knows about. With my slow nod of permission, he goes to work as I sigh in resignation. This process of fixing all of the cracks in my walls is going to take a great deal of energy, time and patience. But I know that in the end it will all be eternally worth it.
