Proper 12, Year A

July 24, 2011

Corrie and I are trying to choose paint colors for our house. We’ve been in the house for almost a year now, so it’s not like we’re acting impulsively. Of course, the colors that are on the walls right now are quite attractive, and have become familiar to us. But we want something different. Just what we want, we aren’t quite sure. It’s been a long process. Over Christmas, I put a few patches of color here and there, then a few months later, another set of options were added. A couple of weeks ago, I put a coat of primer over all of the old paint samples, and we’ve started anew. It’s getting rather urgent, because I’m starting two weeks of vacation tomorrow and the plan was that I spend much of the time painting. The problem we’re having is that we find it hard to imagine just what this or that room will look like in this or that color. We ask ourselves, is that what we really want?

In a way, our struggle with paint colors is not unlike much of life. We live in patterns and routines that we follow for no apparent reason except that they are comfortable and we can’t imagine what it might be like to live in a different way. It’s only when something big shakes us out of those old patterns that we see the possibility of something new, although often that possibility is quite frightening, brought on by illness, death of a loved, loss of a job, or something else of that magnitude. It’s rare that we will take such leaps into the unknown, into an imagined future without such prodding. The comfortable, the familiar, is just too easy, too normal. Continue reading →