We always said we would only decorate one room at a time.  Which is obviously why we’ve chosen to decorate three all at once.  Yes, we are in the middle of redecorating and, yes, we are crazy.  The reason for three rooms in one go is because we’ve had sound proofing put up on all the walls adjoining our neighbour who enjoys listening to the television very loudly.  We don’t enjoy listening to her programmes through the wall quite so much….

Preparation, I think, is the worst part about decorating or having any kind of building work done.  Adrian and I spent a couple of weekends and several nights with a steamer and scrapers in an attempt to clear the walls of paper.  We thought the study would be the easiest room because we only needed to scrape paper from one wall.  But it was harder than you might imagine because once we’d stripped the top layer off we discovered we’d been lazy when we previously decorated and simply papered on top of the paper that was already there.  Uh oh.  Not good.  Oh well, we resignedly started stripping the next layer off too.  But as we progressed along the wall, we realised that someone had painted words over the top of the wallpaper.  And, the painted words were almost impossible to scrape off.

Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.

I recalled that I had painted that across the wall in a fit of evangelistic zeal several years ago when we previously decorated the study.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  But as we laboured hard to remove the words so that the sound proofing could be installed, I couldn’t help regretting my action.

‘Remind me to do this never again,’ I groaned to Adrian, as I nursed my aching arms.  It was probably a good thing that we found the writing rather than anyone else because I doubt it would have had the desired affect of drawing attention to Jesus, I should think rather I would have been cursed for my stupidity!

As we struggled to remove the painted words, it strongly reminded me that my name is written on the palms of Jesus’ hands.  I am that precious to Jesus, He has actually engraved my name on the palms of His hands.  Wow, what love!  Engraved – that speaks of permanence.  It’s not like Jesus will ever think, ‘Oh boy did I make a mistake with her.  Where’s the soap so I can wash away her name?’  No, even though I have bad days when I let Him down (I guess every day is like that if we’re honest), He will never remove my name from His hands.  Because He bought me with His own life, the price He paid for me was way too high for Him to change His mind about me on a whim.  No, as Augustus Toplady’s beautiful hymn puts it:

My name from the palms of His hands eternity will not erase;
Impressed on His heart it remains, in marks of indelible grace.