Currently, my husband, Dana, and I are working to rescue an old side table I retrieved from a burn pile. It had a chunk out of the top so had to be cut shorter and the edges re-routered (is that a word?) and now we are stripping and sanding, and sanding, and sanding. It's a lot of work! It takes so much pressure to scrape decades old paint off. But, that paint is nothing but a build up of ugly! When it is gone, it will be a beautiful piece of furniture.
As I reflected on Jesus admonition to "love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, your soul, your MIND and your strength, I thought of all the times our thoughts make a mess of things with layers of lies we have believed and a distorted perspective that has buried the truth of who God created us to be. As I reflect on all the build up of lies I have believed I realize I may need to undergo some serious transformation. The parts of me that are broken must be restored, re-edged, stripped away and sanded down to bring me back to my original beauty. Sounds uncomfortable, at best, which is probably why we are so averse to any type of transformation in our lives.
Thoughts are very powerful and can turn the trajectory of our lives. What we think determines how we feel and what we feel determines how we react and behave and that has the power to make or break our relationships and directly impact the degree of joy we find in life. God wants to help you sharpen your mind by focusing on what is good and true and that requires sanding off the build up of bias, unforgiveness, anger, resentment, envy, pain, and lies that have made a mess of your mind. It takes work. Adding a coat of paint to disguise the problem is easier, but ultimately makes our issues worse.
If you want to find lasting beauty in life, you have to invest some time and perhaps some pressure to find out who you are at the core, without all those layers of confusion and false identity. In the end, you will see that life is so much more abundantly joyful when you find the "you" that has been hidden. The "you" God created with a purpose. The "you" that is His masterpiece. It's amazing how the transformation of our thoughts can help us see the beauty in ourselves and others, too.
PARENT POINT... It's a far better plan to sand away your own issues than to attack others with a sander. That isn't your job and they won't like it...however, if it is your child, it IS your job to gently clear away the things that you realize are hiding the beauty God created in them. Selfishness, disrespect, envy, arrogance, dishonesty. The world will be hard at work adding those layers, so be attentive and don't let them build up and dry there. If you address them immediately, they can be wiped away while they are still wet and abrasion is unnecessary. These are called the teachable moments. In a child's eyes, every misbehavior that you permit, you promote and it will continue and require some painful sanding down the road. Instead, point them to the beauty that God placed inside them and help them develop that into maturity.
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