The Toilet Room Mural

It started with one verse. 

It turns out that this is my roommate Beth's verse of the year. She's focusing on letting the old things fall away and growing in the new things that God reveals to her. 

I didn't know all of that at the time that I designed this mural, so that made it all even more cool. 

As you can maybe see from the bottom-right corner, this is our toilet room. I say 'toilet room' because our bathroom is actually comprised of three rooms: a room with a toilet, a room with a shower, and the room that connects them both with mirrors and sinks and cabinets. It's a great setup. Anyway, the toilet room was quite boring with its blank white walls. 

By the end of the first weekend at school, this is how far I had gotten. The tree was done and the birds were flying out of the branches. But then it sat that way for about two more weeks because I didn't have time to complete it. 

It was a work in progress. 

Then, I finally got some time this weekend to finish the other half: the roots and fish. 

And here it is, the final product. Now we and all of our guests have something to look at when we go to the bathroom. No more yawning blank white space.

I felt this weird tension during the two weeks in which the mural was incomplete. It didn't look bad, by any means. It didn't even look like it was, in fact, incomplete. If you hadn't seen the original sketch, you wouldn't know that there was more to be done. But I knew. Every time I went to the bathroom, I saw that mural and knew that it wasn't finished yet. 

I feel that way with my life too. I am a work in progress. Some days I feel like I'm getting closer to being the person I'm meant to be, while other days I feel like I'm getting farther away. There is a gap between the person I want to be and the person that I am. There is tension in that gap. It is uncomfortable in that gap because I know that, in a perfect world, there would be no gap. One of life's great journeys is to close the gap. Or, rather, to let God close the gap, since I know that I haven't exactly proven capable at it so far. I'm still a work in progress. 

Good thing God is a patient artist.