Wallpaper and Sin

We remodeled our upstairs hall bath last week. On Monday a friend tore out the cabinet and pulled up the floor to start laying tile. On Tuesday he finished the floor, which left Wednesday for me to strip wallpaper and paint. Now mind you I have stripped wallpaper in our downstairs 1/2 bath, our dining room, one of our upstairs bedrooms and our bedroom. If you have ever stripped wallpaper you know that it is usually not a fun job, but you get through it. Well this bathroom had wallpaper from hell (sorry if I offended anyone)! What I thought would take me about 4 hours took me 8 hours, and believe me this bathroom is not that large. As I labored away I kept trying to give myself pep talks. All of life is to be lived to glorify God. So I kept thinking, okay God how can I glorify you in this. Sadly to say, I wasn't doing too well. But as I continued to think I asked God to teach me something from the intense frustration I was feeling at how hard this wallpaper seemed to be stuck to the wall. That is when I came up with wallpaper and sin. Now I am sure you are asking yourself, "What in the world does wallpaper have to do with sin?" Well let me tell you.

When you are stripping wallpaper you use a scorer to make tiny tears so that the water can get behind the paper and start loosening it up. You soak the paper, wait a few seconds and you start lifting a corner. You start pulling on the piece hoping that it will come off in one big piece. Let me tell you when that does happen you want to scream from the mountain tops! There is such a feeling of elation that you can hardly stand it. So you go to the next piece with great anticipation of another large piece coming off and all you get are little pieces that you usually have to pick at with your fingernails. Then the feeling of elation is now reduce to frustration and sometimes anger that it just won't come off. Well I got to thinking that is how my sin is a lot of times. God will reveal to me a sin and I confess and repent and it feels wonderful, like the big piece of wallpaper that comes off. But there are other times when I seem to fall back into the same sin over and over again and I feel like I am just picking at little pieces and the frustration and anger can be overwhelming.

God has been doing some refining in my life lately. He is showing me areas of sin that I have lived with for a long time and have been able to ignore. I can't ignore them any longer nor do I want to. I want to scrape and pick the sin so I can experience the wonderful freedom of forgiveness. So wallpaper and sin have a lot in common. Once the wallpaper is down, the paint is up and you look at a new room you can truly rejoice in what God has done.