First off, a Myers-Briggs J and a powerwasher is a bad combination because there will always be another spot to do. This happened with the walk from our door to the sidewalk. I wasn’t intending to clean it but as I accidentally washed a few areas of it while cleaning off our front step, I realized that I needed to do the whole thing because I just saw more and more that needed to be done. So, I ended up spending from about 9a until about 5p washing our deck, our fence and arbor, our front step, our gutters, our front walk, some patio furniture and finishing by getting incredibly messy doing the stone path that had gotten overgrown a bit through out garden.
But this morning as I was doing the deck, I kept hearing the words from Romans 4-6 that I had read earlier. As I took off a few years worth of gunk and saw the color of the deck underneath, I was praying about what Paul wrote about how we are gifted grace by God through Jesus. But to get to that in our lives, Paul writes about our being “justified” by God - made right. But there is still the process of sanctification - the getting through all the layers that we have built up over the years - our sin, our defenses, our walls, our barriers to receiving God’s transformation. It takes time, it takes effort, it takes patience, but there is beauty underneath is all - the beauty of each of us created in the image of God. It sure feels good to know that God keeps working in and on us.
So tonight I feel grateful for the free gift that God has given that no matter how many layers there are, God never
gives up on us and is willing to do the work of getting through all those layers to the original beauty beneath.
