Painting with a Broad Brush

I’ve asked my friend Shawna to paint some more of my furniture. Last year she transformed my French couch with a creamy linen color she custom-mixed with Annie Sloan chalk paint. 

Then she coated my dresser in a dreamy color she suggested: Paris Grey. 

{She didn't even need to show me a paint swatch since any color with Paris in its name is chic enough for me.}

I love everything about Shawna’s decorating style. 

When she moved a few doors down from me, I couldn’t wait to see what she did with her townhouse since it’s exactly the same as mine. 

When I finally wrangled my way in {pushing aside her protests that she wasn’t ready for tours yet}, I found she fashioned drop cloths into curtains for her bedroom windows, hung a turquoise cow painting on her wall, placed French champagne buckets as centerpieces on her tables, and of course filled her house with her own painted furniture.

So a few weeks ago, she came over to take a look at my vintage buffet and a chest of drawers in my bedroom. 

Both pieces look dark and dated {and I’m refraining from exiling them to the resale shop} so I thought maybe paint could bring them back to life.

We talked colors and I told her I’m thinking of shades of creamy white with a dash of Provence blue to highlight drawers and doors, but I’ll leave the details to her. 

I completely trust her style and artistry.

Which is kind of surprising since trusting isn’t all that easy for me. 

When someone says, "trust me, you’ll like it," I tend to think that's a sure sign that I probably won’t.

But it seems that relinquishing control of some parts of my life is what God’s been proposing to me. 

He doesn't force his way into my heart, but he leaves it up to me, asking, “Trust me with this?” or “Why don’t you think about loosening your grip on that?”

No matter how hard I try to figure things out, I'm not heading in any particular direction, I'm not leaning toward any certain solution, and I've not come up with any type of a plan.

I’ve let the pieces break and scatter and I’ve watched God put them back together. 


I’ve watched the cords unwind and unravel and I’ve seen God restring them into something altogether different.


And I've stood before the mountain range of impossibility and I've watched God make a way where there wasn't one. 


{I’ll bet you've got some of these similar mountains in your life too?} 


So I've decided to camp here a while. I've pitched my tent. Unpacked my suitcase. And I'm making myself feel at home.

This is where I'll be waiting when God comes down from his holy mountain. Because there is one thing I am sure of: I don't want to miss him.

Years ago, I was fresh out of college and mired in a job search that went on for months, full of dead ends and brick walls. 

The internet didn’t exist then {it's hard to imagine a life without Google} and I was in a new city with few networking connections. 

It was the most hopeless year of my life. 

I was living with my parents who were going through their own financial and business difficulties. I knelt on the shag green carpet of our rental house praying for a job, praying for hope, praying for an upswing in our circumstances.

Back then, a career, my own home and a car seemed like a far-off dream.

But that hard year was my first experience to really know more of God than I ever had before.

He was laying a foundation of trust in me that I could look back on through the years as a remembrance of what he had done and to see how far he'd brought me. 

I finally found a job that allowed me to buy a car, but it took several more years before I could afford my own apartment.  

And eight years and three jobs later, I finally landed the very job I'd prayed for and dreamed of during that first difficult year out of college.

My experience has been that God does not move quickly in my life. He’s much more interested in slowly doing a work in my heart and securing my trust than in giving me what I’m asking for when I want it. 

And it’s taken me a while to realize it, but I want that work in my heart more than I want the change in my circumstances. 

So I'm waiting for Shawna to show me a few more furniture paint colors on Pinterest because she wants to be sure I'll like what she chooses before she gets started. 

She really doesn’t need to because even if she wanted to paint my furniture frog-leg green {my least favorite color}, I have a feeling it would still look lovely. 

She has a way of giving dreary old furniture a new lease on life even though they’re on their last spindly legs.

I know I can trust her.

I'm having coffee with my friends at Holley Gerth's place at Coffee for your Heart and with Bonnie Gray at the Faith Barista. Join me there for more inspiring posts!