Paint and Perfection

I don't know if it is my love of abstract art, but I simply adore Jack's paintings. One of my students works at a pottery place, and she told me I wouldn't believe how many kids come in with parents who refuse to let the little ones put paintbrush to pottery. 


"They'll mess it up...Right?"


I guess it depends on your definition of "mess."


When did we get so caught up in perfection that we forgot what perfection is?


But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me (2 Corinthians 12:9). 


In all the messups and missteps of life, we can be glad. When our brushwork goes outside the lines, we can boast. Why?  Because though we make mistakes,  we were made by One whose power is beyond our imperfection. 

"Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins
GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him. Jack's art is lovely to me, and I am lovely to my Creator, whose "beauty is past change" (l. 10). And though He calls me to try to be more like Him every day ("Be perfect as I am perfect," says Matthew 5:48), I'm thankful that God loves me, not despite my flaws, but flaws and all. this post is linked up with