My wife and I have several restoration projects that have been on our things to do list for a long time, some of them years. It is not that we do not have the dream of restoring them, we just have not begun the work of doing so. As I have been thinking about the process of transformation, it dawned on me it was like getting to those projects we have not tackled yet.
The hardest part is getting started and saying today we ARE going to begin work on this project. Our friends have told us the first thing we need to do is strip all the layers of paint and coatings off of the piece we want to refinish. We need to strip it down to the bare wood. We are going to have to strip away all the years of dirt, layers of pain, varnish and anything else that might be on it. Doing so is a lot of work, so we need to really think about how seriously we want to do this. Once we start, then we have to be intentional about getting rid of all the layers and getting to the solid wood that is underneath all these layers.
Aren’t we all like a piece of furniture that needs to be refinished. We all have an area in our life that needs to be stripped down. Some of us have more then one. We pick up a piece of furniture with the intent of remodeling but never quite get to it. We have an area of our life we know we need to work on, but never quite made the intentional decision to actively and intentionally work on it. So we carry the excess baggage around until we made decision to begin the refinishing and remodeling process. When we finally make the decision to work on it, we tend to find ourselves having to forgive ourselves for not working on it sooner. Sometimes forgiving ourselves is the hardest part of the process.
When we forgive ourselves, truly forgive ourselves, we are also allowing the Divine in us to forgive us. It means we have to allow ourselves to fully experience that forgiveness and that, in and of itself, takes off layers of pain and hurt and anger. It allows us to begin the process of getting back to the core of who we really are and were created to be and let our light shine in a way it was not able to underneath all those layers. So this month, why not allow your Higher Power, however, you define that, help you remove some of those layers and restore yourself to your original beauty.