jaychick.com

Lets be honest, no one wants to make a mistake. No matter how small or insignificant that it may be, we don’t want them to happen.  People can get hurt, relationships bruised, money lost, and the list of repercussions goes on and on.  I have something that I think will help, but take it with a grain of salt and my only hope is that you will be blessed.

Mistakes happen.  No matter how hard you try to avoid them, they happen.  And they come at times that are inconvenient and can be quite unsightly and down right embarrassing sometimes.  And in my experience the more I try and not make mistakes the more of them I make. 

I was watching Bob Ross a while back and something that he said… Wait, I should tell you who Bob Ross is.  He is the painter guy on channels like PBS that teaches you how paint over the air waves, you know, the white guy with big afro and beard that hadn’t changed his clothing style in like 30 years.   He is always cheerful and saying things like “Lets just put a happy little tree right here”  and “oh, do you see how that just makes that just come alive.”  He is always painting landscapes and he never runs out of tricks that just seem to fall out his sleeve.  Anyway, he was painting this classic landscape and low and behold, on national television, he made a mistake.  Something I think has only done maybe one other time in his whole painting career.  Then he said something that just caught me, “mistakes are ok, don’t panic, just work them into the painting.”  Then he took that mistake he made and transformed it into a tree in the foreground of the painting and made it look like it was meant to be there.  If you didn’t see it happen you would never have know it was there.

I like his advise and I think it goes beyond painting.  You see, good ole Bob probably made a lot of mistakes in his career off the air before he was ever in a place to possibly make one on air.  And his mistakes on air were probably few and far between.  He learned though making mistakes that you can work them into the painting rather than scrapping the piece and starting over.  He learned that mistakes are ok, and that all you need is the knowhow to take the mistake and work into the painting.

Like I said before, we are going to make mistakes, but do we have the knowhow to work them into the paintings of our lives?  God has extended to us grace.  Christians especially, have a really hard time taking advantage of that grace and receiving it.  People tend to be harder on themselves and have higher expectations of themselves than God does.

Relax, enjoy the painting process, the thing about it is that we are not paining it by ourselves, we are painting it with the Great Artist.  And he has a pretty good idea and plan to work any mistakes that we make into our lives rather than scrapping it and starting all over.