This has been the summer of the project for me. Said projects have included sorting through all my papers stretching back to childhood, painting the bathroom dark purple, beginning the application process to do respite foster care, cleaning beneath the sink where for a few dreadful months a legion of mice took up residence, organizing students to come into school on their summer break so I can interview them on camera for a larger undertaking, painting the kitchen cabinets dark teal, listening to all of Narnia on audiobook, making lists of things to read and places to clean and food to cook, emailing with a travel agent about the course I’m leading to London with a teacher-friend next summer, hanging curtains in my living room that actually block light, finishing the non-fiction piece I started last summer about my endless adventure on Amtrak, and coming across a bag of cut-up t-shirts and deciding to make a quilt, though Lord only knows when that will happen.

All these things are for more than keeping myself busy. I paint because it improves my home, and therefore, by gentle degrees, my life. I plan to foster so that I can share that gently improved life with others. I take on creativity of various kinds to give myself a stable basis for joy.

I suppose on a larger scale, projects in general are all part of the good life, perhaps most of all in their unfinished state—when we are in the midst of the doing, the nailing the roof tiles, the writing the chorus of the song, the signing of the umpteenth form. Because we were designed to try. We are the strivers, the dreamers, the sweat-ers, the laughers, the wanderers and the wonderers, and the pursuers of goodness.

And the best of it is that though in our bones we are tryers, we do not finish the good work. The Lord is the one who brings it completion, who perfects our faith. That truth makes trying much easier, the burden of it light. His promise that he will finish the project that is us, the project that is all creation, his promise that he has already done it, means that we are free to try our best and understand just how little that is, to receive participation trophies in the form of abundant grace, to be prodigal children stumbling home reciting our apology speeches as our father crosses the finish line to meet us, to become transformed children of God waking up with paint still staining our nail beds to each fresh morning in which we can do it all again.