Painting is fun.
Just ask Tom Sawyer, who relieved all the neighborhood boys of their treasures for a chance to whitewash his Aunt Polly’s fence.
The brush or roller goes in the paint, then travels over the wall, leaving its appearance transformed: What was once white is now green or yellow or blue.
It requires care, of course, so no spots are missed, no drips end up on the floor and no beads of paint form little globs marring the smooth surface of the freshly painted wall. But those mistakes are easy enough to see, and, if noticed immediately, not difficult to correct.
That, I think, is the beauty of painting: it’s almost the epitome of immediate gratification. One stroke of the brush, and the color of the wall has changed.
It’s also a lie, because of all the work that goes into getting ready to paint. Washing the walls, filling in nail holes and spackling cracks. Sanding that down, then washing the walls again to remove the dust. Taping the edges. Priming, although that has some of the benefit of painting. Waiting for the primer to dry.
You don’t have to do all the prep work, of course. You can paint a dirty wall. You can paint without fixing holes. You can even paint without taping the edges, if you don’t mind the messiness. In a college apartment, managed by a company that managed thousands of college apartments, I once watched two guys paint our three rooms in two hours with no preparation whatsoever.
Of course, the walls and the trim were all the same flat white as the rest of the apartments they managed, and I think they trapped a fly in the paint on the wall and just painted over it.
But if you want it to look good and to last, you have to do the work ahead of time. And that’s the part that’s no fun.
But that’s life. Any time you learn a new skill, the beginning is hard. You make mistakes, you fix things, you try to do things that are beyond your grasp and fail, but you learn something from it and try again, and maybe you fail again, but at least — hopefully — you don’t make that same mistake again.
Then, when you get good at it, it’s fun. People say you make it look easy. You might even think it’s easy, and wonder why not everyone does this. You forget all the work that came at the beginning, all the prep work that got covered up by a fresh and colorful coat of paint.
But all that work is still there, just under the surface. Without it, that top layer of paint, the end result, wouldn’t be the same.
That applies to our spiritual lives, too. We want the mountaintop experiences without the long uphill slog. What can we do to be better prepared for Mass or for prayer? What are the underpinnings of our relationship with God that need attention? What can we do to make that relationship pop with color?