My Life and Two Cans of Paint

To celebrate the MLK Jr. holiday, my wife and I decided to paint our basement (as an aside, I highly recommend the movie Selma, it's probably one of the best movies I've seen in an long time).  Well, it was more me suggesting yesterday that since we both have the day off we might as well get around to getting the painting done, we've been talking about doing it since we moved into our house a year ago.

So we went to the paint store, bought our paint and supplies and woke up at the crack of dawn (for me literally) to begin painting the basement.  Keep in mind, I'm coming off a week of recovery from surgery and being told not to lift more than 10 pounds.

In a lot of ways, I saw who I was in the walls of my unpainted basement.  Still ready to be molded, to be transformed into something more.  I just had to take the initiative.  As I began to apply the first coat of paint to the wall all of the fear, doubt, anger, confusion, and pain of the last few weeks began to disappear.  Here I was, taking control of my environment, bending it to my will.

This blogging (all three entries of it) hasn't been easy, standing in front of a congregation making myself vulnerable to over 160 people wasn't easy.  But, it has been me, choosing to open my life to others.

If I'm going through a fight with cancer, it will be on my terms.  If my treatment makes my hair fall out, I'm shaving my head.  I am more than my disease.  I took my moments of despair, my moments of rage.  I cried out to a God that may be absent, "How long Lord?" .  But I am more than my despair, my rage, my lamentations.

  “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”

I'm not in denial, cancer kills people.  That's been hard to wrap my head around.  I have come face to face with my own mortality; a whole lot sooner than I ever wanted to.  But, I am still in charge.  Last time I checked, I'm the one who makes my feet walk forward, I'm the one who rises to face each new day.  

I'll end this musing with the poem Invictus:

 “Out of the night that covers me, 
Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 
I thank whatever gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance 
I have not winced nor cried aloud. 
Under the bludgeonings of chance 
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears 
Looms but the Horror of the shade, 
And yet the menace of the years 
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate, 
How charged with punishments the scroll, 
I am the master of my fate: 
I am the captain of my soul.” 

-William Ernest Henley