I was sitting on my front porch yesterday, enjoying the beauty of God’s world around me. There are lots of trees, birds, squirrels, and even an occasional deer to help me focus on the serenity of nature.

I was distracted, however, by something very close to me, which prevented me from focusing on anything beyond it. Before, I had successfully overlooked it and pretended it wasn’t even there. This time I realized I couldn’t ignore it any longer.

It was the peeling paint on the banister just in front of me. No matter what else I tried to look at, it was constantly there in my peripheral vision. A flaw—no, a defect. And getting worse all the time.

Since I could no longer ignore it, I thought about my options for dealing with it. One extreme would be to strip all the paint off, prime it, and give it a totally new paint job. Another extreme would be to tear it off, buy a piece to replace it, and throw out a perfectly good piece of wood. Neither of those options seemed appealing or even necessary.

I thought about the slogan Easy Does It, and wondered how I could apply that to my dilemma. One way would be to open a can of paint, slap some on to make it look better, and hope that would take care of it for a while. But when I applied rigorous honesty to that solution, I realized it would just be a shortcut that would end up being even more work later on. Eventually the cracked area would reopen, and the mildew that was present would soon eat its way to the surface again. It might do in the short run, but it would still look bad and wouldn’t really solve the problem.

The best way, I knew, to make that slogan work for me, was to scrape only the dead paint off, wash it down to kill all the mildew, and put a fresh coat or two of good paint on it. In the long run, that would be the easiest thing I could do for myself. And while it wouldn’t be perfect, I would at least feel that I had done a good job on it. It would no longer be a distraction to keep me from reveling in the beauty beyond it.

One dilemma remained, however, which probably had a lot to do with my tardiness in fixing the problem before now. If I repaired the top banister which was peeling badly, the rest of the railing would look dingy; indeed, some of its paint was beginning to crack in other places. The “perfect” solution would be to scrape, clean, and repaint the whole thing at once, but that task felt overwhelming to tackle in an already busy weekend.

Once again, Easy Does It came to my rescue. I realized I didn’t have to do the whole job at one time. I could do the worst part this weekend, the not-as-bad part next weekend, and paint the rest of it to match on another weekend. That way I could do the job right and end up with a nice looking and well-repaired front porch!

While waiting for the paint to dry today, I’ve been wondering how all this applies to my recovery as a whole….