Happy Easter and Home Improvements Reveal a Lot

Happy Easter!
It was a beautiful Triduum, followed by lovely gatherings with family and friends. I am so grateful for the beautiful people we are privileged to call family and friends!

I hope your celebrations have been equally lovely.

I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted! Besides all the Easter celebrating, I have been working my fingers to the bone trying to finish my crazy mudroom/laundry room project — but the end is in sight!

My project has left me with some profound questions, like, “why do I like to punish myself?” and “have I bitten off more than I can chew?” and even shallow things like, “will my hands ever look the same?”.

So many questions — but in the end, I think this will be a space that will solve some of our organizational problems. I am happy that I did it.

I did begin with the idea that we would have a professional step in, but after looking at a limited budget and our one carpenter friend being unavailable, I decided to take it on myself.

Right now, I’m still in the midst of it, but I figured I’d share my progress and a few things I’ve learned along the way.  A full reveal will have to wait for another time.

I think that the biggest take away thus far has been that we are capable of much more than we think that we are capable of doing. My best advice is to find people who can steer you in the right direction and have a lot of patience with the process.

I have to say, finding a few angels at the local hardware made all the difference in the world. There were a group of men there who generously shared valuable expert advice, problem solved with me, and did their best to ensure my ideas would become a reality.

And I have to say this man, in particular, cut every piece of wood to size for me. He was amazing!

I kept looking at him like he was St. Joseph come down to Earth.  I couldn’t have done it without him.

I also had my son join in for the first day and I got to teach him a valuable lesson: turn the power off before man-handling a power outlet! Oh boy, did I get a shock.

Well, that was dumb of me, but hey, hopefully that will save my son’s life one day.  This would have been my last living picture if it had been more than a shock — and it wasn’t even in portrait mode. 🙁

This whole experience also taught me that I need to pace myself.  For the first couple days, I was going a little cray-cray. I started feeling terribly run-down and on the edge of getting sick — not to mention the fact that I was most definitely not being the best version of myself with my family.

I was looking at the people around me, especially the littlest ones, as inconveniences.  They were an obstruction to my goal of efficiently working away at this project.  Honestly, they were irritating me.

I’d look at my two year old who didn’t want to leave my side — who refused help and food from anybody but me — and I began to wonder if I would ever finish this project.  I allowed that to influence my behavior towards the many interruptions that seemed to plague my progress.

Honestly, I allowed my desire to be “efficient” to get in the way of a  greater call to love the people around me.  I have heard it said that real love begins when you accept the inconveniences of interruption to respond to the person in front of you.  As a mother, I can get behind that idea.

How often do we find ourselves annoyed when our work is “interrupted”? How many times do we fail to see the greater call to love the people around us when it becomes inconvenient? Too many times I have fallen into that trap.

After one particularly trying day, I went to confession, and I can honestly say everything changed after that.  I fell more into God’s pacing instead of my own harsh, task-master pace that typically comes with any project I ever begin.

I decided then and there to try my best to not steam-roll over everybody around me to get this project done.

I began to try to make this simple act of putting up bead board and trim a prayer of sorts.  It honestly changed everything — well, almost everything.

I still found myself throwing around a few choice words at frustrating moments, but at least it keeps a soul humble, lest they think they’ve achieved sainthood.  No worries in that department.

One thing that I’m beginning to realize is that the second we begin to become harsh task-masters — demanding too much of ourselves and others in our attempt to achieve an inhuman level of efficiency — the second we begin to ignore the more important needs of the people around us — that’s the second our project ceases to be a prayer and instead turns into a bit of a curse.

I mean that.  Every single task we begin can actually be a prayer.  If only we take it at God’s pace and chuck “efficiency” out the window.

Machines are efficient — people, they are anything but efficient — but therein lies their beauty.  The greatest tyrants of our times raised up efficiency over humanity. We need to push back against that, especially in our own homes.

It’s good to be reminded that any work of beauty requires time and patience and walking with God at His pace, not our own.  It takes trusting that He will provide what we need when we need it.

It requires staying in the present and not worrying about if we’ll have the grace and strength to complete the project.  It’s trusting that we will have that grace and strength to keep moving forward.

Yes, I learned all of that during this project.  I learned that I need to take care of myself and others around me while trying to accomplish my goals.  I need to believe in the multiplication of the fishes and loaves — and that God wants to do that with our time and our efforts again and again.

I also learned that God sees all the effort, and when I come home to a finished project and find out that my two year old colored with pink neon marker on my walls and door — I learned that I need to forgive that two year old and that life can be frustrating and that all of our hard work can be erased in a minute. 🙁

That’s right.  As I was working on this post, my daughter screamed up the stairs to inform me that my 2 year old took pink marker to my newly painted walls!

But my one consolation is that God sees it and He knows the hard work that I put into it, and He knows that I would choose this baby over a houseful of clean walls in a second.

So that, my lovely friends, is why I believe there will be more projects in the future — much to the fear and trepidation of my beloved husband, John.

But enough of all of that, I have to go off and say a few choice words and repaint some walls now.  Oh, Catholic momming — it ain’t easy.

Sharing over at Kelly’s