“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. 12 Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. 13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. 14 I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity.[b] I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.”
Jeremiah 29:11-13
“For I know the plans”….
From the day we bought our house, we started making it our own. We have changed just about everything in our house, except our foundation. This winter, during a random conversation, we decided to paint a half wall in our house.
The wall was in need of repair. Life with kids, as it has, creates dings and strips paint off the walls. Last winter some stickers stuck a little too good, causing some paint to pull off when I took the sticker off. It wasn’t just the sticker, when we remodeled we did not use the proper paint over the new area of drywall, so the white paint just couldn’t stick as well.
Now, the question…What color? …Do we keep it white?
It has a molding design on the wall, and the white on white just doesn’t pop. It needed color, when we completed the largest remodeling project in the house, we just couldn’t figure out what color to paint it. We had selected so many different colors, and shades that are just the slightest bit different to appease my aesthetic pleasure. We just couldn’t figure out the right shade for that half wall.
BLUE!
It hit me all of a sudden. I knew just the shade I wanted too. My husband agreed! I got paint samples and we picked the one that we both thought would be just right. I got straight to work, the half wall was painted in no time. (This time, I made sure to prime it with the appropriate drywall paint first!) It looked perfect. We both loved it! It made the molding pop!
After the painting was complete, I sat back and looked around. In the home design world, typically they suggest when you introduce a new color, you should introduce it into 3’s. Since our remodel several years ago, I had changed the rugs, which had this similar shade of blue, I had bought removable slip covers for our chairs, which had a similar shade of blue, and I had displayed pottery pieces/plates that had a shade of blue. Of course the wall should have been blue.
At that point, I stopped to think about God, in our everyday life. Every day He provides us with pieces of “blue”. Each day God provides for us in ways unknown to us. He is shaping us, molding us, to fit His plans for us. Though this relationship is between He and each of us. We have the choice to listen to his voice, the choice to pick up those pieces with “blue” and add them to our lives, and the choice to paint the wall, to work towards completion of the plans, or we have the choice to keep the wall white and just patch it up, until the next hit, but never fix the issue in the first place.
Where is God shaping you today? Can you take a step outside of ourselves and look around to see what pieces He is adding around you? Are you choosing to listen to this voice and change to the ways He is calling you? Or are you staying the same taking hits over and over again, patching the wall, but still never fixing the source?
"Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart."
-Jeremiah 12:13
He wants you to call on Him, even in the everyday. Seek His voice in those small moments of frustration, doubt, loneliness, fear, anger. Seek His word, to hear what and who He calls you. He knows our heart, He is waiting for us to get the right primer and start painting our life blue, so that we too will "pop" for His Kingdom.
