Sometimes recalling certain memories can be like peeling the paint from an old weathered house. You know the old house needs it, it’s crying for it and yet the whole facade will change. Peeling back the paint will remove the years of character and sometimes charm, but underneath it all you know the walls need to breathe, to be set free, and sometimes the old paint holds moisture in, green and molding smelling ripe like mildew. All unseen by the naked eye without the begrudging labor of the paint peeler.
Withholding our memories, holding them at arm’s length, quivering like a lost puppy who whimpers and shies away from everything including a loving hand, we fear what we will find underneath it all! We fear that others will be horrified when the truth is revealed…memories are like prison bars and razor wire fences. We’re a captivated audience of one, too afraid to move…to make a break for it. Too afraid of our own shadows lurking within corners that we’ve created. Memories that we avoid do not fade, but rather they deepen in their staining. And we within our self-made prisons peer out at them from behind our bar windows, clutching fragments of sun light instead of basking in it.
This old house needs a new, fresh coat of glossy clean paint that sparkles in the sunlit day and gleams when the stars in the night sky comes a callin’…but first this old decrepit brown weathered tinged paint must be peeled back…we must reveal our hurts, our wounds, our heartaches, we can’t just paint over the old for the old with infect and deflect the new.
So with weapon of choice in hand we, knowing it to be the right thing to do, must embrace the mess, confess to the wrongs, embrace what it is now, relish the opportunity to begin again. Peel back the pain that harbors itself beneath the paint. Let it breathe free and when the sun has baked its cold moisture away…this old house can take on a new creation.
Pastor's Ponderings 