1000 Little Steps

This week, our family set out on a great and grand adventure.

Not to some exotic or exciting location.
Not to some amazing destination.
Not even to some place we'd been wanting to visit.

We began the journey of remodeling our bathrooms.

This is a journey we have been on before.

Our first trip down this road was painting our master bedroom room in our first house.  The paint we got from the local hardware store was mixed incorrectly.  It essentially looked like cottage cheese.  We didn't know it was not right.  We kept stirring and stirring and stirring.  We even put some of it up on the wall before convincing ourselves that something was wrong.  We ended up with some very nicely textured walls!!  There was removing the little blue bird wall paper in the guest bedroom of that same house.  Then there was building a small home office in the basement of our second house.  There was remodeling both bathrooms in that house too- goodbye pink vanity top ~ seriously why was that even a color choice.

To be clear, I am no Bob Villa or the Property Brothers.  But, over time, you tend to accumulate some amateur skills and a few tools.

One of my favorite metaphors for Philip Simmons is that our lives are the unfinished house we all live in...with half finished sheet rock...our national flag is a blue tarp.  Another way of saying that is that we live in a construction zone.  Right now our old dinning room table is serving as mission control with our purchases from Home Depot.

I seriously think when we are done with this...Home Depot stock may go down.  I will try to give you a heads up.

There are two truths we try to hold onto as we enter into this journey:
1. It is a thousand little steps...try to focus on each step...not getting too far ahead.  It is easy to want to rush into dreaming about tile or getting the vanity put in places (that is also sitting in the dinning room by the way).  But, we are not on that step yet.  We are preparation.  We are on fixing walls and making sure we are doing the best job we can.  Take the step for today.  It sounds so simplistic, but it is so hard.  My frustration comes when I want to be ten step down the road.  I think this holds true for the journey of life.

2. There will be unexpected problems...that take longer than you want!   This last week, we demoed a small bulkhead above our shower...which is a good way to get out some frustration.  I was trying to pull a simple 2x4 off the outside wall of our concrete house.  I pulled, I tugged, I pushed with all my weight on the crow bar.  It was painful inch by painful inch.  By God's grace, eventually the board gave way.  Only after, did I realize the nails were stuck into the concrete.  Ugh!  Again, this is a metaphor for life.  We see something we'd like to do, and suddenly some obstacle arises we have to deal with ~ day in and day out.

Our lives are the unfinished houses we dwell.
Our lives are construction zones.
Our lives are a thousand little next right steps.

Now, if you will excuse me, there is some priming of walls I need to do.

May there be more than a trace of God's grace in your life as you take the next right step this week.

Blessings ~~