The Painter

People are not expendable. I think too many times we give up on people because we don't feel they are worthy of our time, efforts or energy. They are not going to bring anything to our already overly complicated, busy lives.

Sometimes, I think we view people as works of art. We see someone's life and we think we know how we can make it better. We take it into our hands what we believe to be this marred painting that is bleak and has nothing to offer and we try to turn it into our own masterpiece. And when we begin to see that the masterpiece is not turning into what we had hoped, we begin to tear it down and shred it up, until all that is left is a million little pieces that we can sweep under the rug. People begin to annoy us, they don't have the qualities we are after, and we wish they would just go away. This masterpiece that we once devoted so much time and effort to, is now just a nuisance. We begin to resent them for not turning into our masterpiece, until eventually, we abandon them and want nothing to do with them - ever.

We took what we saw as a marred piece of art and thought that we could refine it and make it into a masterpiece, when in reality, God is the only one who can do that. We are just merely the medium which God uses... there are so many torn up pieces of art that need to be put back together and accepted for the beautiful masterpiece they already are, the masterpiece that God created.

We cannot abandon any work of art simply because they don't fit into our agenda.

Pictures of Success

We all have our pictures of success. Those proud moments in our lives forever captured in a photograph. For some people it is a wedding day, the birth of a new baby, the job promotion, graduation or a first car. The thing is, no one ever has pictures of failure. Those moments in our lives when we made a bad decision, chose the wrong people to be friends with, were hateful towards someone or destroyed a relationship.

Our pictures of success are reminders to ourselves. Reminders that we have value, we're worth something and we can accomplish things. But, what happens when we cling to these pictures too tightly for too long? Sometimes we cling to them for so long in fact, that they become our identity, and this is how we want the world to view us. The danger in clinging too them for too long is that we get stuck where we are and never move foward.

Or, even worse, we refuse to admit that perhaps, right now our lives are a picture of failure. We wake up one day and realize we're fat, we're broke, our relationships have fallen apart, we haven't accomplished any of the things we set out to do 5 or 10 years ago. So we continue to cling to our pictures of success, because we believe it is easier to live in the past, to look at our past accomplishments rather than face the future.

The thing is, that our pictures of failure did not develop overnight, anymore than our pictures of success developed overnight. Our pictures of success, while taken in a single moment, are actually the culmination of a series of events leading up to that moment. The wedding day is a result of meeting someone, falling in love, a proposal and then the wedding. Graduation is the conclusion of years of study and gaining knowledge. This same principle is true for our pictures of failure.

We did not get fat in a single moment. We didn't go broke in a single moment. Our relationships did not fall apart in a single moment. Instead, all of these things are a result of a series of events that led us here. Eating too many calories, failing to budget properly, allowing oursleves to drift apart in our relationships.

To create new pictures of success, we must first stop clinging so tightly to our old pictures. They should only serve as reminders of the things we can do and the places we can go. You can lose the weight and be that thin girl again in the photo. You can recapture the love and admiration you had for the person in your wedding photo. You can create new pictures of success..... the Bible says it is healthy to do so ;).