Scraping Away

I love finding things on the side of the road. My rule of thumb is if it has the slightest bit of potential, it's coming with me. I still remember my first little gem I found in my neighbors trash in high school. I painted it and used it as a nightstand that traveled with me to college and is now sitting in my living room. Anyway, yesterday I was leaving my neighborhood, spotted a cute little table, threw it in my car, and today I found my self standing at the paint counter at Wal-Mart, ready to give my find a fresh new look. It was an old wooden table with a cheap layer of veneer on the top. The veneer had buckled in some places and if the table was going to be salvaged, I need to scrape the top layer off. With my putty knife in hand I began scraping away the old, imitation wood. Some pieces came off with ease, and others I had to really work at. As I was scraping away, I could not help but realize how this process mirrors my own walk with Jesus. The more I read the Bible, I realize that God is not interested in some cheap, imitation faith. God is about getting to the heart of who you are, the "real wood" so to speak, but in order to do that, He has to scrape off the fake stuff. And sometimes, its painful because you realize that you really are broken. For instance, God tells us not to murder, and on the outside, it seems like I haven't failed Him there. However, Jesus tells us that if anyone hates a brother or sister, they are a murderer. That is painful, because those words bypass any external front I try to put on, and cuts straight to the heart. And what about idols?  I used to think that I was in the clear because I have never melted my gold earrings down to form a golden calf, but as Jesus has been scraping away at me, I realize that idols are not limited to statues, but they are anything that I care more about than God himself, and if I am honest with myself, I find that those things exist. I am thankful that my little table was not left on the side of the road for long, it was snatched up, and then fixed up, and it now sits in my living room. God is the same way with us, He does not leave us where we were, but He takes us in and begins to make us like Christ. He wants to clean me up from the inside out, and frankly, He is the only one equipped to do that.


Here is my table before:

And after:



I have known I wanted to start a blog for awhile, but I didn't know where to begin. I kept waiting for Neil and I to do something really cool and that could be my first blog post, or something dumb like that. A couple people in our Bible study thought the stories I would tell about our newlywed adventure needed to be blogged about, I told them I was well aware, but I didn't have a name for my blog, and therefore  I obviously could not begin writing. They suggested "Watermelon Tuesday's" because we were having this conversation on a Tuesday night while eating watermelon. The name stuck, but I was still waiting for a "blog worthy" story.  Today as I was painting my table I realized that the whole reason I want to blog is to remember the little details. Whether that is what God is teaching me through a DIY project, the interactions I have with my students at school or the random moments Neil and I share as we eat our dinner next to one another on our couch. Every day is filled with something I don't want to forget.

So here goes.