Faith & Kitchen Cupboards
I nearly skipped putting that second coat of primer on the backs of my kitchen cabinet doors. The time I’d planned for stripping and painting the cabinets had drawn days longer than expected, as with most home improvement projects, you find additional problems best remedied while the place is torn up- like water damage requiring I rebuild the base of the cupboard under the sink, etc. I told myself that the backs of the doors were good with one coat of primer, “after all, who’ll see them?” This was my thought ten years ago when I slapped a varnish stain on the cabinets without even removing the doors- a quick fix that was meant to make it look good for the short term, ha. I’m grateful I didn’t take time to varnish the backs, or it would have meant another day stripping doors.
I’m blessed with a more-than-ample kitchen, and remember my gratitude after moving from our first house, which had six cupboard doors, including the ones under the sink and only enough counter space to hold the dish drainer. The time I spent stripping, sanding, cleaning, priming, and painting each kitchen drawer and door- 45 of them after I opted for open shelving in one place- gave me time to get to know them. The outsides all looked the same, but I could often tell, as I worked on the back of a door, where it belonged in my kitchen because the inside revealed its purpose: the scars from being slammed against the sliding canned good drawer, the grime and spills from the garbage, the black marks from the cast iron, a “from the kitchen of” label pulled from my Granny Jeffries’ chokecherry syrup and stuck inside a door (I painted around this).
Working with 45 surfaces gave me time to think, and I considered how our faith is like my kitchen cabinets. We can slap a varnish of a smile on our outside surface, showing the world we’ve got it all together, but inside we could be empty, or so crammed full of other stuff that there’s no room for God in our lives. We hide our scars and try to look like everyone else, but inside we wonder if there’s something more: “Where’s this Lord that some people have such hope in?” and “if He’s so transformative, why are many Christians judgmental and condescending?”
The answer was in the doors, or on them, rather, as I primed them again, laid white in rows, like a cemetery of soldier markers in my living and dining rooms. The answer is TIME, the time we spend getting to know God. The time spent removing the hardware (our busyness), stripping the varnish (casting away what’s keeping us from Him, anything we hold above Him), sanding the rough surfaces (our unkind thoughts or actions), cleaning… it’s like spending time in Scripture and in prayer. I got to know each door’s purpose by devoting time to it, focused on it. We get to know the Lord by spending time with Him, focused on Him, not for what we want Him to accomplish for us, but because of our relationship with Him, our love for and dependence upon Him.
When we spend time with Him regularly, the Holy Spirit prompts us to clean the dirt out of our corners. We sand and prime our hearts to know Him better and be presentable for Him . We do this on the inside, not just the outside, as we don’t want to be a white-washed tomb, a filthy cup that looks clean on the outside. We add a second or a third coat, if needed, even if no one sees it. What if the inside of the door was more important than the outside? What if we were made of glass, if our hearts, motives, desires, were on view to everyone as they are to God? A shellac of Christianity doesn’t change what’s in our hearts. We can’t change what’s inside us without spending time in His presence, seeking to know Him more, cleaning away the clutter and making space for Him in our lives and especially our daily routine. Our faith can’t rest on our appearance, on reading a few verses each day or showing up to church on Sundays- a partially varnished kitchen where glossy doors hide what’s rough, raw, scarred, aching, empty or crowded.
The doors and drawers are the only actual wood of my kitchen cabinets; the rest, in 1990’s manufactured-home fashion, is compressed wood fiber formed and covered with an image of wood grain. The doors may be oak, but the remainder of the structure -the functional, vital part of my kitchen storage, is not what it pretends to be. My only option was to paint, to unify my cabinets and doors in color, or in “spun cotton” white, in my case. Under the paint, it’s still oak doors and drawers mounted on fake wood, in-valid in purity, like myself, unable to stand before Him on my own substance, my own lacquer of works or appearance, justified only in what Christ did for me.