PAINTING CHAIRS

​These wooden chairs with dark green legs and backs looked adorable in our first home in Atlanta with the forest green kitchen counters (I cannot believe I picked that color). When we moved to Oxford sixteen years ago, my mom helped me paint all of the green parts black to look snazzy at our new address with gray floors and black shelves.

A Fixer Upper for our kitchen chairs.

​This week I’m painting them again. These chairs are lived in. I mean really lived in. Six people constantly coming and going equals approximately four billion meals and seventeen billion pushes in and out. These chairs are weathered, and not in a romantic Fixer Upper sense. In fact, I had no idea how beat up (and sticky) they were until I began their makeover. This time around I’m painting them white. First, they needed a major scrub down. Next, they needed about a dozen coats of paint. Let's just say I had to make several return trips to Ace Hardware. They are the exact same chairs that have been with us through a move, a PhD, career changes, four babies, a graduation, and hundreds of family meals and card games.
 
They are the same chairs, same height, weight, sturdiness, but these ol’ chairs now look like I just bought them at Pottery Barn. You guys, they’re gorgeous! I keep gazing at them. I am so pleased. Because—wow, they’ve been transformed.
 
This is exactly what Jesus does for us, flawlessly, perfectly. He takes all of those scratches, dents, and unidentified sticky stuff we accumulate by being humans going through life—our mistakes, our shame, our regrets, our pride, the things we joke about, but aren’t really funny, the things we would never even joke about, because there’s too much there—and scrubs them down, paints over them, making us look brand new. Just like my chairs didn’t achieve anything to deserve their makeover or do anything to become bright and white, we don’t do anything or earn our fixing upping either. All we have to do is come to Jesus, and say, “You are my Lord,” and He gets out His paintbrush. He does His thing and although we’re still us—same quirks, experiences, talents, and passions—we become bright and shiny and unbelievably pretty.
 
Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. –2 Corinthians 5:17

2 Corinthians 5:17

​Then six years later, sixteen years later, or the very next day we’re a mess again. Because people spill stuff on our egos and on our dreams, and we allow it to stick, and we react. Because someone bumps us a bit hard and we retaliate or internalize. Because sometimes we want to be pushed in when we’re pulled out and sometimes we want to be pulled out when we’re pushed in, and we try to do things on our own, and end up banging ourselves up, because we do not trust God and His perfect plan.
 
And once again, the Master Carpenter, gets out His sandpaper and paint and fixes us up over and over again, restoring us to a beautiful sheen, taking us from items for this weekend’s garage sale to something fit for His throne room. He loves us that much.

It's Christ love that transforms us. Nothing we do on our own.

Some of these fixes are easy—a quick touch up. Some of them are hard. It was way easier to paint the green legs black than to cover up all of that ebony-colored paint with bright white. But God doesn’t care. He carefully restores us, whatever it takes, coat after clean coat of grace.​

​When He’s cleaned us up, God keeps gazing at us, and He is so pleased, because with His love we have been transformed. If that’s how God sees us—brand new, showroom worthy—then shouldn’t we allow ourselves to see the refurbished version of ourselves, to see our true reflections, the incredible masterpieces God created us to be?