Painting

Yesterday I worked with some of the youth of my church to paint their classroom. Our youth program is really great, and one of the great things is that we let each cohort of youth decide how they want to paint their room. The idea is that this allows them to make the space theirs, to have a place that they want to come to because they see themselves in it. This also means that the room now has two black walls with multicolored splatter paint and two lime green walls with handprints and names. It's pretty awesome. I was thrilled at the amount of enthusiasm and participation we had and at the way the kids are already bonding through “war paint” on faces, paint in hair, and paint coating arms up to the elbow.

But the truth was, I was pretty nervous when I left the house yesterday morning. Nervous about not having ladders, nervous about whether the kids would get along, nervous about whether the parents would be satisfied with our supervision and scheduling and everything, nervous about a nagging anxiety in the back of my mind that turned out to be the fact that oh yeah, I don't have a key and the church is locked on Saturday morning.

I've written about this before, but what I've finally learned to do, though I still have to re-derive it every time, is turn my nervousness over to God – tell God flat-out that I want to do a good job but I think I might be in over my head, and I'm going to need Him to take what I have and make it enough. It doesn't make the nervousness completely go away, but it helps. The last time I wrote about this, I then spent most of the day sort of checking in with God every now and then. This time I talked to God and then dove in and was busy all day. I didn't think about God again until we said grace at lunchtime. But He was there: in the graciousness of the parishioner who unlocked the church for us, in the amazing leadership skill of my co-leader, in the joy and enthusiasm and efficiency of the kids, in the effectiveness of the paint remover fluid on the floors and walls, and in the excitement of the youth and appreciation of the parents as they showed off their work. It was a good day.