Picture Perfect

We laughed; we sang; we . . . . painted. Girl's Night for daughter and I. We chose painting as our evening activity. We stationed ourselves at opposite ends of the table and set brush to blank canvas.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that we were both painting the same thing. A sunrise. And it wasn’t much longer before we started muttering our frustration. “God makes it look so easy,” I said. “He speaks and paints the sky with incredible beauty and here we try so hard to copy it.”

She was committed to hers and would stay on track to completion. I, on the other hand, repeatedly experimented with various techniques. I tried making adjustments and corrections to get the visual image out of my head and onto the surface. The harder I labored the bigger the mess.

It wasn’t really the end product I was shooting for anyway. The main intent was time well spent. I painted over the entire surface with sky blue paint. Artist daughter had another idea. She took my place before the rejected work and set to make a new creation.

She made something beautiful from my mistake.

“Isn’t that just like God? He takes the ugly and turns to lovely. He salvages our errant attempts and recreates for better use.”

It makes for a neat modern-day parable that can possibly be applied in life. First, leave God-things to the Master. And, stop my miserable attempts to fix my messes and ask God to step in (I usually just make it worse). Remember, He always creates something lovely from our messes and takes the hideous and makes it beautiful.

He got us out of the mess we're in

and restored us to where he always wanted us to be.

And he did it by means of Jesus Christ.

[Rm 3:21 Msg]

Thank you, Father, that You don't abandon the work of Your Hands and leave us in our messes. Thank You for the beauty, more than skin deep, that You create from my self-made ugliness. Amen.