Sometimes the process isn't pretty

Did you ever plan a project only to have it go very wrong?

I was so excited to get a much-needed improvement underway here last week. After months of waiting, my front door was going to be refinished!

Here it is, all sanded smooth, ready for its new look.



This photo from last fall gives you an idea of how the door had become pretty weathered:



Here's a closer look from Christmastime:

As you can see, the door was a golden color, but badly weathered at the bottom. What's really sad is that the door was never supposed to be a golden color.  In general, I prefer painted doors, but this one is solid mahogany. So I decided to have it refinished in a darker stain.

I knew I wasn't up to doing this project myself, and I'm glad I didn't. I never would have made it through all that sanding.

Although the professionals I hired spent lots of time prepping the door for its new stain, no one could have predicted the outcome:

Yikes.

So while I had planned to have my front door all beautifully refinished and ready to show off by now, it turns out that it's still in process. And the process isn't very pretty.

But isn't that the way life goes a lot of the time? We dream, we hope, we plan, we do our best. . . and sometimes things don't turn out at all as we'd envisioned.

Sometimes things take a lot longer than we'd imagined.

Sometimes things get worse before they get better.

Sometimes things aren't pretty when they're in process.

But we press on. If necessary, we regroup and re-imagine, but we don't lose heart.

This is one of the ways we can help each other, I think. When one of us is stuck in a difficult part of the process of life, the rest of us can gather around. We can offer one another a word of encouragement, a pat on the back, a much-needed hug, a reminder that everything is going to be okay.

What about you? Are you going through any processes that aren't very pretty these days?