So much Trouble.

tarnish.
silver gets it.
age just brings it.

Mom works at this place where she has to polish silver often. She said that it has convinced her never to own any silver of her own.

She especially hates to clean tea sets. All those parts, pieces, and decor. And the real kicker is that once all of the tarnish is removed, the tea set is about 10 times harder to photograph with its high ability to reflect.

It got me thinking that sometimes we go to so much trouble to get the junk off things of value.
I think it's those days that we feel our good intentions were, in fact, good.

The house next to ours looks haunted. Well. Okay. It looked haunted. It was dark brown, with rotting wood and ivy creeping into the cracks. The two porches looked like they were ready to collapse. A few men and a woman have been working on it for the past month. They've cut and pasted white siding on the walls and chopped up both porches. The third story was frightening to watch them side as they dug trenches in the snow for their ladders and balanced their wood planks on tree limbs. And, again, it just got me thinking that sometimes we go to so much trouble to cover up something rather awful.

And perhaps those are the moments in life when we know exactly what we are and we're face to face to the reality that our thoughts and actions and our dark heart is the same haunted house no matter what color of siding we wear.

So may you see your heart of darkness (to reference Conrad), and may you put on the righteousness of Christ, which is so brilliant that no lens could take the image in.

And do it because God has gone to so much trouble.