Making it Match

March 5, 2018

If only life were as easy as this. Under our stairs is an unfinished closet. It has the basic framework, a door and shelves, but after four years of living here, the paneling is still missing. I’ve had various different men looking at it. One was ready to build the panels and doors until his shop burned down. One man did part of the work, but instead of a paneled door, gave me a slab of plywood. Nice, cabinet-grade plywood, but still plywood. He did however, manage to build a nice drawer set for under the television cubby I had built. Some of the trim work is also installed. To keep the drawers from getting smudged with dirt and fingerprints, I decided to stain and varnish everything now, rather than later.

Unfortunately, it is always a challenge to match stain if you can’t remember what is on the surrounding woodwork. Of course, I can’t remember, so I took a sample of what is already stained and varnished to Home Depot for comparison. I matched everything as nearly as I could, came home, and started to work. It looked pretty good. Until everything dried. The existing woodwork has a reddish tint to it, while what I put on the drawers and trim is a dark blackish-brown. Not even close.

Fortunately, I have plenty of cans of stain in the basement, from other mismatched projects, so it wasn’t hard to find a red chestnut stain that I applied over the darker wood. It came out pretty close. Which leads me to this evening’s musings. 

Life is full of mishaps. Some are purely accidental, others more intentional and deliberate, but however they come, our lives don’t always match with what should be. In the case of my closet, what should be is the original stain. In life, it’s the pattern set out in the Ten Commandments and the life of Jesus who taught that the greatest commandment is to love God fully, and the second greatest, to love our neighbor as ourselves. Making our lives match with the standard set for us isn’t as easy as simply applying a different coat of stain. We can’t just cover over what’s there and call it good. 

In life, we only match God’s ideal when we are clothed with the righteousness of Christ, and we only put on Christ by first taking off the old clothes of sin through repentance and confession of sin. Then, by faith in what Christ has done for us in his sacrificial death on the Cross, we put on his righteousness and, wonder of wonders, we match! I think that’s something for which to be thankful tonight.