Musings From My Garage: When God peels off our damaged veneer

Musings from my garage...

Pieces of a beautiful, old buffet sit in my garage right now. We're moving in T minus 4 weeks (and 1 day, but who's counting?) and I've not packed one. single. thing. But I HAVE launched into a full restoration project.

As I spend sweaty, gritty time in that hot garage (It's 100 degrees in Texas right now), and follow the process of wetting the towel, letting it lie on the piece to loosen the damaged veneer so I can scrape it off and reveal the beautiful original wood underneath, I feel a message from the Holy Spirit on my heart.

The process is tedious. I have to soak the towel, which makes it heavy and hard to wring out, and place it on the piece. Then, my least favorite thing, I have to be patient while the water does its thing, which can take hours. The heavy wetness of the towel seeps under the cracked veneer, loosening the glue and allowing me to use a hammer and putty knife to lift and scrape the veneer off. Naturally, this isn't a full-proof process. The veneer chips and breaks, and not one piece has come off in tact or easily, but if I skipped that step, the piece would only be scarred and broken from the resistance of putty knife meeting years-old, unforgiving glue. The hammer-to-putty-knife procedure is long. Sometimes, in my zeal to rush the process I knick the wood underneath, causing more damage.

Sometime during the tap-tap-tap, scrape-scrape-scrape monotony, I had a lightbulb moment.

We're like that buffet.

As time goes on and life happens, our veneer becomes scraped, chipped, and damaged. Some dings and scrapes add character, of course, but often they're unsightly and take away from the piece as a whole and from the Creator's original design. They reflect lack of care and damage. God, the Master Builder and Repairer, lays the Holy Spirit over us like the towel. He loosens our resistance and allows us to be available to the "putty knife and hammer." Removing the outer layer is often tedious, time-consuming, and painful, but it's necessary to reveal the beauty underneath. We can't rush the process or circumvent the steps because that only creates more problems and takes away from the beauty being revealed.

So as we're in the tap-tap-tap, scrape-scrape-scrape seasons of life, may we yield to the heaviness of the Holy Spirit and allow Him to do His work on and in us.