Selling Paint

Years ago, someone I loved left a job where they were doing what they loved and were gifted to do. 

They left to sell paint.

“Selling paint” has become shorthand in my life for someone I love doing something I don’t understand. In the original selling paint story, I could not accept what I thought was an utterly absurd decision. My entire body raged with a need to understand. And in my not understanding (and my inability to accept the situation without understanding), I caused a lot of harm.

Everything in me wants to understand, all the time. Understanding is relational, and relationships are my bread and butter. Not understanding, not being able to understand, twists me up inside. Not understanding and life moving forward anyway is the worst unresolved chord at the end of a song. It’s unnatural, unfinished. I don’t want to move on; sometimes it feels like I can’t move on without understanding. 

To this day, when “selling paint” happens in one of my relationships, I struggle to accept without the resolution of understanding. How can someone I love do something that is so obviously wrong or unwise or ridiculous? I know them! I know what’s best for them! I know who they are and how they should act! And the hardest one: How can someone I love do something that hurts me? At the very least, I want to understand what is happening if you’re going to hurt me . Why are you hurting me?

I try to be open minded, willing to be convinced, to understand. Tell me more about yourself, about why this is best for you, about how these decisions line up with who I know you to be. Make this decision make sense to me and maybe my pain will make more sense. And if my pain makes sense, surely it won’t hurt as much. I want to understand. 

Wanting to understand people is a good thing. We all want to be understood. We want to be known. We want people we love to pull close and “get it,” and so we work to understand each other. 

I don’t buy the narrative that we should never have to explain ourselves. That people are “either in or they’re out.” The people we have committed to, the people who have put money into the relational bank are deserving of conversations where understanding is sought. It is an act of love to seek to understand, and it is an act of love to try and help someone who loves you understand.

But the older I get the more I am coming to learn that love doesn’t always mean understanding. And that love certainly doesn’t have to wait for understanding to catch up. So sometimes we have to let acceptance be the bridge between not understanding and love. Sometimes we say to ourselves, “I cannot believe they are going to sell paint” and then we take them to dinner after their first day of work. 

I hate the idea that we can love someone, know them so deeply, and not fully understand them, but there is a spiritual truth there. A realization that we really are finite. That we can be in the most intimate of relationships and still not be able to fully mine the depths of each other. It’s not that being known and understood is not a key part of relationships, but what “selling paint” reminds me is that love cannot hinge on understanding. Because when it does, love can easily be tipped over by a job change, an invitation to a celebration or a new relationship we just don’t and can’t understand.

When love becomes synonymous with understanding, we get stuck in cul de sacs of conversations, trying to get answers that will never satisfy. When understanding is everything, our relationships become about convincing instead of embracing. We will very literally talk a relationship to death when we believe, even subconsciously, that understanding is a prerequisite to acceptance and love.

The bridge of acceptance doesn’t necessarily mean changing my mind. I can still think what they are doing is wrong or dumb or hurtful. Acceptance as a bridge to love is an acceptance of the situation, the decision, despite it not making sense to me. Maybe years later we understand why they made this nonsensical decision or maybe we don’t. But in the meantime we didn’t let not understanding keep us from love.

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A few years ago my mom had the privilege of becoming close to someone whose life story could not have been further from hers. This woman’s story bumped into some of Mom’s beliefs about the world and God and ways that she had always thought and boundaried her life. Mom listened, learned and built a meaningful friendship, mostly through organic, unforced conversations. And in the midst of Mom changing because of this friendship, she called one day and said, “I am never going to understand. I have not lived her life and so I won’t get it fully. But I see goodness, and I don’t have to understand to affirm her, to love her.”

In that simple decoupling of understanding from acceptance and love, Mom let go of months of angst and leaned into the peace the Spirit so willingly gives us if we let Her carry the weight of knowledge. 

So as we go into another week, someone is going to have the audacity to go and sell paint. Maybe, if we are lucky, we will ask them about that decision and we’ll walk away with the peace of understanding. But just as likely we will talk and pray and read and try with all of our might to understand and we will come up short. We will still want to shake the person or lobby them with our point of view one more time. We will still have tears, disappointment, confusion. We will look over at love and think, “How can I get back there if I don’t understand?” And thankfully the Spirit will open Her hands and offer us acceptance. Acceptance without understanding.