The Hard Things

This past week and a half, I’ve been having my house painted. It is a chore for sure. 

Today in an effort to help get things wrapped up and finally finished, I went outside to touch up a few spots myself. Just me trying to be helpful.

Oh, but… I set the paint tray on top of a planter for what was supposed to be one quick second.

The wind had other plans…

Within said second, the tray blew off the planter and landed upside down on the concrete. Yep. Not a little bit of paint either. Face palm…

If you know anything about paint on concrete, you know your brain immediately says, ‘Well this will be there forever.’

But instead of spiraling, something else happened. You see, I have these wonderful alcohol based wipes that I have been using for about a year now in place of Lysol/Clorox wipes that tend to get things off of other things rather quickly… So, I grabbed one and started scrubbing the concrete. Then I grabbed the unattended bottle of alcohol we all have under the cabinet and poured a bit on there….

And immediately the paint started coming up! Little by little. Wipe by wipe.

(It did take a hot minute. Accompanied by pure stubbornness and sheer willpower. And maybe a few Bounty paper towels.)

But it worked!!! Sitting there crisscross applesauce on the ground. Sweating over spilled paint.

And I had this thought… This is what healing looks like sometimes.

Not graceful. Not pretty. Not some inspiring, well put together blog. Just you… hoping to clean up something messy in your life.

I think we underestimate ourselves sometimes because we only measure strength by the big things. The major losses. The pain. The heartbreak. The survival stories.

But honestly, sometimes strength looks like handling the small disasters without completely unraveling.

Sometimes courage is just staying with the mess long enough to figure it out.

And I did. Me and God and a bottle of alcohol and some wipes and a determination I had yet to find until today…

I can do the hard things.

I can even get paint off concrete. 

Yeah… I did that.

Which tells me… You can, too.