From the mind of Paul Jones

Right now, I am sitting in my living room typing on my computer and forcing myself to be creative. It is something that I have been trying as an experiment– sit down at a computer and start typing and hope something profound comes out. My latest thing has been to pick something in the room and just start talking about it until I figure out how it represents something relevant in my life. Lately, I haven’t been that successful as my new experiment usually results in some sort of unfinished abnormality–like most experiments, there are a lot of misfires.

Today, I sat down and the object I am to going to focus on became immediately apparent. My living room’s boundaries are defined, like most rooms, by four walls. My four walls are unique though, and most likely not like your walls in at least one particular way. The story of their uniqueness began ten months ago after I purchased my cute little 1950’s brick cottage home. My house was custom built in 1953 by the owner of the home and contained several features that were highly fashionable at the time but do not rise to the level of “vintage charm” in the twenty-first century. Most notable among those features was the liberal usage of pine board paneling. Now, don’t get ahead of me; what sets my walls apart from yours does not include wood paneling, but it does however, begin with large quantities of blonde pine paneling and a very large framing hammer.

Once I had set my mind on replacing the paneling with sheet rock, it didn’t take me too long to bust out a load of man-tools–you know man-tools, those tools that seem to make men to produce an overabundance of testosterone because they are used to do violent or destructive things. I will not bore you with the details of the removal of the paneling, but I will let you know that about 3/4 of the way through it, I asked myself what the heck I as doing. By the time that everything was ripped out, I had no solid walls in my kitchen, my dining room was completely naked from the waist down and the largest wall that runs a good portion of the length of my house from the corner of my living room under the stairs and to the wall on the opposite side of the hallway was striped to the studs. I looked that the skeletal remains my home and wondered what kind of trouble I had gotten into.

This is the point where those of you who know me might go, “Oh Crap!” That response would be appropriate if you knew my history with large building projects. In Phoenix, I got the itch to tear out my carpeting and replace it with tile. As with everything, the tear-out was easy but laying 750 square feet of tile in the diagonal afterward was a project I wasn’t ready for. To make a long story short, I lived in a house with concrete floors and torn out appliances for about 6 months before I completed enough of the project to get my house back to normal. The worst thing was that I stopped tiling after I finished my kitchen and left my walk-in laundry and pantry unfinished…well, it eventually got finished–three years later when I was getting ready to put my house up for sale.

Don’t draw any conclusions yet, because my walls are not unique because there are no walls. I knew myself well enough to hire someone to install the sheetrock. Four days after I had finished stripping my walls to the bone, the walls were then adorned with the pale gray paper backing of sheetrock panels joined together by seems of bright white plaster. In some way, I was eager to begin to work on the blank canvas. I stopped by Home Depot and started looking at colors. Here is where I need to let those of you who don’t know me, in on a little secret–I love color. After years of living in apartments with blank walls, I was eager to get a hold of my first home so I could finally have colored walls…but not just color…COLOR! I don’t go for taupe or cream, I go for colors that make your brain go into overload. An my first house in Phoenix, I was going for a different color in each room. From a fairly tame mustard yellow living room, to a Home Depot orange hallway, to a Kermit the Frog green bathroom… I’m always looking for color that stands out.

But before sheetrock is ready to be painted with wonderful vibrant colors, it must be primed. Primer seals the sheetrock so that it doesn’t absorb your paint and make it patchy. Sure, you can paint directly on it, but that would require you to paint multiple coats to get uniform coverage… and in general, primer is cheaper than paint, so using a primer is usually the best bet…but, that means that you have to basically paint everything twice. Now, I established earlier that I love color, but the reality is that I don’t like painting. I am very anal about detail work, so it usually takes me a long time to paint a room. But before I get to paint the room, I first had to prime it.

I got knee deep into priming when I realized that I didn’t want my crown molding to be stained, I decided to paint the crown molding white, so I started priming the molding as well. For those of you adept at painting, you might be predicting my next experience, if you were thinking “bleed-through”, you are correct. You see, stained wood doesn’t play well with the average primer, the stain, which it chemically designed to bleed into the wood to color it, bleeds into the primer as well and will also bleed into the paint. So, in order to cover a stained wood with a primer, you have to use a sealing primer to seal the stain and prevent it from bleeding–when you are planning to paint something white, it is pretty much a necessity. Enter the Killz.

Kills is the most popular brand of sealer primer–and it isn’t cheap. I had abandoned the priming of the dining room walls in favor of getting the molding primed. Even using Killz, it took a few coats to get the stain thoroughly sealed. After sealing all of the molding in my living room, it became clear that more prep work was going to be needed. Now that the molding was white, all of the spaces between the molding and the sheetrock became obvious, so I was going to need to fill the crevasses with a paintable caulk. Yeah, another trip to Home Depot. With the trim molding primed and caulked and the living room wall primed, I felt to abandon priming the dining room and kitchen in favor of selecting a color for my living room and getting started. I had feedback from others on the colors I was considering. Some liked a darker, some a lighter; I abandoned all the choices I was considering and went for a bright medium yellow. I marked the paint chip and headed out for my favorite home improvement store once again.

Now the story, thus far, might seem like a normal weekend for some, but my adventure is far less normal. Instead of being a host of chores over the period of a weekend, I managed to stretch such a simple task out over a period or three months. While we are moving rapidly toward where I am today, we are still not there yet. You see, I bought two gallons of paint, brought them home and set them in my dining room, where they sat unused for four more months. Yup, you guessed it. Procrastination raises its ugly head again and many weekends are squandered as I spent my time in a living room with one large primed wall and random blotches of white plaster patching on other walls. All the while, two gallons of paint yearned to realize their full potential and live the life for which they were created.

Over the months, I had many excuses for not doing the painting, though none of them were valid–they were just excuses. Eventually, I awoke one Saturday and because of the recent drought, my lawn was not in need of mowing and I had nothing else to do, so the painting spirit fell. I ran around my house prepping everything, getting out all of the needed painting tools, moving furniture, laying painting tarps. It was just before lunch, so I figured that I should probably eat before I started. Without any food in the house, I was off to the Waffle House down the street to fuel up for the task ahead. Food service was exceptionally slow and it was almost 1:00 before I got home. So as not to be distracted, I dived right into it and started rolling on the paint. The coverage wasn’t that great, so it was going to take two coats. I got the large wall and the first half of the second wall done before I changed gears and moved into trim work on those walls. Somehow I figured that it would be less work if I only had to move furniture once. As I was winding up trim work, a friend called and I became embroiled in a conversation about paint and painting. Next thing I knew, was that it was 5:00 and the sun was dipping below the trees. As the light faded in the room I started thinking that I could finish the next day after church since coverage was poor and painting by bad light always results in having to go back an repaint–at least that was the argument the Procrastination used to convince me to halt my progress.

The next day was Sunday and I didn’t have any plans. After church I opted to go to lunch with a bunch of folks–certainly I still had plenty of time to still get the painting finished after lunch–I thought. It is funny how time runs away from you, especially when the suggestion to do some go cart racing after lunch is offered up. Little to say, I ended up burning a few hours, caught up in joys of bumping and grinding on a small racetrack adjacent to a local putt-putt golf course. The rapture of such an enjoyable distraction failed to get my walls painted and when I arrived home, the walls still sat unfinished.

Fast forward one week and three days. I sit here on my couch in a room with some very distinct walls. As you might have guessed, the thing that sets my walls apart from yours is that mine are partially painted. Many days have passed and Procrastination has prevailed again. It bugs me every time I walk into this room, because, unlike the white primer walls, the partial yellow is hard to ignore. Yet, despite all of the things that should move me to get this project done, the paint still sits waiting, watching, hoping that the spirit of painting will fall again and my room will finally assume the status that it always should have–painted.

With that said, I find that this “unfinished” thing is a horrible pattern in my life. The highway of my life is littered with thousands of unfinished projects. I have a portfolio full off unfinished art and a computer full of unfinished writings. What is it that allows that fire of motivation to quickly smolder and die? One of the challenges that I now have is how to take ownership of this tendency. For years I have condemned myself for being this way, I harbor a great amount of guilt for the unfulfilled promises of my life. In a quick conversation with my pastor the other week, he kind of laughed when I bemoaned my proclivity towards procrastination. After his quick chuckle he looked intently and the eye and offered a profound question. He asked, “Did you ever stop to think that it is OK to be that way?” He went on to challenge my personal condemnation by proposing that God created me that way intentionally. I never really thought that God would have personally made me this way. The idea that I am this way because it is exactly the way that I need to be for God to work on me in the unique way he needs to work on me seems almost unbelievable.

There is something liberating about embracing you faults. Not in a reckless way, but in a way that simply allows you to open to the Lord and and allow Him to work on you in whatever way He needs to. It seems that for the longest time, I thought that God needed me to be different than I was, but I am beginning to believe that I am exactly who and what I need to be for God to reach me in a way that is intensely personal; a customized visit from the God of the universe, who is not waiting for me to become something, but able to visit me in a very personal way, simply because I am exactly the way that I am. Not necessarily with the intention to be the same way forever, but in a way that allows you to appreciate the changes God makes or doesn’t make in your life.

At some point, the walls in my living room will be painted, the art will be hung and the space will be enjoyable. But you know what, when that happens, I will appreciate it in a way that I never would have if I didn’t deal with it being so horribly unfinished for so long. Maybe that is a point of life, so many things unfinished an incomplete for so long that one day when they are compete, you have a greater appreciation for them. Much like the way that the story in Genesis put Adam alone in the garden. I’m sure he would have been aware of how alone he was. But God doesn’t simply create a mate for him, first God passes all of animals in front of Adam to name them. Certainly, by then Adam was clear that no other animal could be an adequate companion; this is possibly why, after naming all the animals, Adam asks God for a companion. Eventually, God takes a rib from Adam and forms Eve–a match for Adam. When Adam meets her he finally sees his completion. Flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones, he declares.

If you are familiar with this story, have you ever wondered why God didn’t simply create Eve at the same time He created Adam? I’m sure that there are plenty of theological interpretations, but at the moment, I choose to believe that He waited so Adam could recognize his need for Eve and appreciate her in a way he never would have unless he experienced how incomplete he was without her. Sometimes, being unfinished is simply a waypoint on the road to completion. The fact that things don’t get finished instantly, certainly allows us to appreciate the final state of completion.

For the time being, I feel content just thinking that I’ll finish painting tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 5:57 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.