He Hit the Wall

He wanted to put his fist through it. Instead, he had to pick up his paintbrush and paint it. He slapped the paint on, stewing and muttering to himself.

This house was a mansion. These people had more money than God. He had spent four years in college. Then he had worked for peanuts to develop a track record. He was good at what he did, too—architectural designing and business administration.

Could he get a job doing what he had trained for? No.

The only way he could feed himself was by painting rich people’s bathrooms and kitchens and bedrooms—rooms that didn’t need any more paint.

He poured some more paint into the paint tray, and then went back to the wall in front of him. He had finished edging. Now he was using the roller. This didn’t give him any satisfaction. It wasn’t fulfilling. Busywork. That’s all it was. What was wrong that he couldn’t get his career, his dream, off the ground?

These people had everything in the world, and he was stuck in their bathroom with a can of stinking paint.

“If you surrender to God’s will, things will flow easy.”

That’s what everyone had told him for years.

He prayed and meditated every day. Sometimes twice a day. And it wasn’t easy. Wasn’t even close. For over a year now, he just kept hitting walls.

“If you do the right thing, good things will happen to you.”

He wanted to do AIDS housing. What could be more right than that?

He wasn’t just upset that he couldn’t get his job. He was angry with God. And every day it was getting harder to believe in what he’d been taught. What was a guy supposed to do when he followed the rules, and what he thought were the rules weren’t really the rules after all?

Jonathan didn’t know what was coming next. He didn’t know what to do. All he could see was what was right in front of him: another wall. The only thing that helped him was painting the wall in front of him and telling a few friends how disappointed he was in God.

Three years from that day, he would describe the situation differently. Jonathan would say how frustrated he was when he had to paint walls and see everyone else living their dreams when he barely had any faith left at all.

Then he’d say how much that emotional experience helped him to work with the people he was providing housing for because many of them felt the same way—only at a much deeper level. He’d talk about sometimes needing training that went beyond what you could get in school or in an office—and that not knowing what was taking place, not even understanding the experience, was important and necessary because if you knew, you wouldn’t immerse yourself in the experience. You’d just wait. You wouldn’t learn.

He’d tell you how well the rules worked. Then he’d explain that surrendering to God’s will meant that sometimes you hit a wall but that the wall wasn’t really a wall after all.

So if we do good things, good things will happen? And if we make negative choices, negative consequences will occur? If cause and effect is the name of the game, are those the rules? Remember Sherry, the pregnant woman who got in the car with someone she didn’t know had been using drugs? What about her daughter? What were they doing wrong? And what about when we think we’re making the right choice and it backfires, doesn’t work, or turns out wrong?

Each time I jump out of an airplane I know I’m going down, not up. The law of gravity always works.

So does the law of cause and effect.

When we do A and we hit the wall because it doesn’t lead to B—or at least not the B that we thought and planned—it’s not that the rules or the law don’t work. 

That’s when the real game begins.

From the book: Choices: Taking Control of Your Life and Making It Matter