How I spent last night:

We have some leaders coming into town to lead a Experiencing God seminar that will kick of like four months of Experiencing God bible studies in about nine churches in our association. So, it's a big to pretty big deal at the church. The leaders need a place to stay and my wife and I needed motivation to clean our apartment up. Sounds like a match made in heaven.

Take the jump to found out how I spent my night preparing for our visitors.

After we got married I was a whirling dervish of unpacking prowess. My wife was equally as impressive as myself, if not more. Then we hit the wall. We had unpacked everything and gotten piles of like items together. We just didn't have a place for everything. So it all set, in piles, in our apartment.

Then, about a week ago, we got the book shelf, from Big Lots. A few days ago I set it up, with the knowledge that we had visitors coming and needed to get a month of cleaning into a few days. The book shelf was the missing piece, we got our books out of boxes and our crap into those boxes and those boxes into the storage closet. We were making crazy good time.

Then we had to decorate, that's what I did last night, till three in the morning. I hung and positioned and hid things in ways that would make HGTV proud. The decoration part was easy if not never-ending. The thing that got me was this one wedding gift, a candle, a candle hurricane vase. We got two and the one in question was king of slowly deformed by heat and pressure in my car for a week.

Needless to say, I decided that my job was to fix this candle. It would be as simple as heating the wax and bending back the wonky portions. This process started at about ten o' clock and consumed me till my wife took the candle from me. That, by the way, was right before we went to bed.

I used a hairdryer first. I tried all three of the heat settings and both of the loudness settings. I did a good job of keeping the heat moving so as not to melt one spot more than another. Of course the goal isn't to melt anything, it's just to soften the half inch think wax. Fun fact, half inch think wax is the most obstinate substance on the plant. They should make tanks out of the stuff.

I gave up on the hairdryer, it was just melting the shiny outer layer. So I thought to myself, "Self, we're just addressing this one area, we need to heat the whole candle." So I put the candle in the oven. I was smart though and put it on the WM or warming setting. First I set it on it's base, which was silly because the pan I had set it on was heating up faster than the candle and melting the base. So I flipped it, but first noticed that the wax paper I had laid down was melting and spreading all over the pan. "No time for that I thought.", and proceeded to put the candle top down on the baking sheet. This did not return the results I had hoped for either.

The process I used during this whole experiment was to heat the candle then try and reshape it with my hands by pushing or pulling as I saw fit. I tell you that so you'll appreciate that I saw the first crack appear during this period of reshaping. The crack was about an inch and a half down the side and I thought I could just melt it closed. So I stood there with a lighter and tried to squeeze close the gap and hold the lighter close enough to make the wax melt.

This whole experiment didn't happen in a vacuum, my wife was there the whole time, being patient and stealing me away to carry something or clean something. But, I would always come back to the candle. Normally the pulling away process went something like this.

Jennie: "Chris, leave the candle alone. I need your help with this box/crate/heavy thing/llama."

Chris: "I can't right now, the candle is mocking me with it's rigidity!"

Jennie: "Chris! Let the candle go."

Chris: "Look at it! It's laughing at me! Do you want the candle to beat me? Do you ?!?"

Jennie: "No sweetheart, I don't want the candle to beat you. Just move this box/crate/heavy thing/llama."

Chris: (Wielding a knife at candle) "You won't beat me! We'll see who's the better man when I get back."

That went on for about 5 hours. My wife is so patient. It was at this point I tried the more holistic approach of letting a tiny tea light burn inside of the candle. I would come back ever 20 minutes or so to try and reshape the devil candle. I tried to watch the crack.

After about an hour and a half of slow roasting with the tea light, the wax got thin and I could feel it give. Of course I had to reach into the candle to adjust it and lava hot wax would cover my fingers. This was a matter of my manhood. The candle was mocking me.

I would move the candle a little and step away. Slowly it started to give up it's bend. Then I noticed the other crack. Then I noticed the other crack. Then I noticed the other crack. I had effectively torn the candle to pieces while feeling good about the movement I was creating. I was crushed. I had taken a bent but still attractive candle and turned it into my own Frankenstein's candle. I told Jennie I could fix it, but she just held me, wiped my tears and told me that it was OK and I had tried real hard.

If you come by the apartment, the candle is on display, on the bottom right hand shelf of the book case. We've hidden my Hannibal Lecter style desecration of the candle as best we can. I've started processing the valuable lesson I learned that night and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with what I have as a priority or something like that. Maybe it's more about my focus. Maybe the big lesson is that you've got to just throw out some junk sometimes instead of wasting time trying to fix it.

Or maybe it's that I'm not a candle repair expert, and shouldn't try things I don't know how to do when ruination of the object I'm trying to repair in a possibility.