This is a story of a striped wall. It can be found in a home in Salt Lake City, near downtown. It is painted with thick rich strips of golden browns. The home is small. The wall itself is small, maybe even insignificant.  But the story behind the striped wall is very significant.

The owner of the home is a dear friend of mine. A very dear friend. Someone I love deep in my core. He is family to me. A brother. During the remodeling and renovation of his home, he was going through intense personal turmoil. A demanding high profile job, parents separating, divorcing, and then eventually remarrying; taking him on a wild emotional roller coaster ride, and other deep personal struggles. So much was being held inside that he can remember nights driving home from work and having no idea how he made it into his house. He had no memory of actually driving himself home. I know I've had that happen to me before. So much was going on in his heart and mind there was hardly any way of knowing which way was up. He didn't know who he was anymore. He was lost.

And then one day he got up the energy and creative gusto to tackle his bedroom. One stripe at a time, he poured out his heartache and frustration as he painted. He said when the project was finally finished, he laid on the floor and literally wept. It was a huge cathartic release of emotion. It was letting his inner creativity out and seeing that he made something! He used that energy and that confusion and created something beautiful. The stripes weren't perfectly straight, it wasn't a masterpiece destined for praise and fame, but it was a symbol of his inner longings: To connect, to create, to express, to emote, to release.

Standing in his room, looking at the wall, I cried with him as he later recounted the story to me. As long as I live, I will never look at a striped wall the same way again.

And it makes me ask the question, like I do so often...what do I...how do I....deal with all this...STUFF that is built up inside of me? This energy, this frustration, this crazy, mad, questioning, grateful, upset, confused, enlightened, bitter, happy, sad....stuff. I think they call it GRIEF, right?

We all have it in there. How do we express it? Do we go running until our lungs burn? Do we scream at our spouse? Do we blame God? Do we hurt ourselves? Do we withdraw? It must be expressed, it must surface, but what is the healthiest way for me?

It has been almost two years since my life changed forever. Two years since my daughter was taken from me. And I have painted many of my own striped walls, so to speak. But I have many more left. Some of my walls are black, the paint thrown angrily all over it. Some are bright yellow and pink. Some are a drab gray.  The hardest part is knowing that my home will never be complete. There will be room after room to paint and remodel, time after time. And sometimes I can see the repairs coming, and other times they are just plain emergency disaster cleanups.

C.S. Lewis put it well when he gave us the analogy of remodeling the human soul and a living house: " Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently, He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of--throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace."

I hope as I express my dreams and fears, I allow God to shape them into something far better than what I had imagined for myself. But it is so painful. So very, very painful.

Like my dear friend, I find that creating something--a birthday banner for my son, a blog post, a meal---is a good way for me to deal with all my STUFF. And like Elder Uchdorf, apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints said, "Creation is our opportunity in this life, and our destiny in the world to come."

So I will continue to create, and trust that in the meanwhile, God is creating something beautiful with me.