Love Stops My Fall

I don’t like to brag, but I think that I’m going to be a wonderful grandmother one day. It looks like it will be a while before I have grandchildren, and that’s okay. It just gives me more time to practice on my grandnieces and nephews. They have given me a glimpse into that special season that so many people describe as the ultimate time of life.
Because he lives so close to us, the grandnephew that I see most often is Dylan. Dylan is the little “never met a stranger/will always remember your name” two year old son of my niece, Kerri, and her husband, Justin Smith. When he walks into our home, everything else stops. The next moments are devoted to him, a hobby that my family thoroughly enjoys.
It doesn’t hurt his case that he calls my husband, PawPaw probably due to Michael’s gray hair. Maybe we should have corrected him earlier, but we thought it was cute, and now the name has stuck. (I should amend the above paragraph to read he “always remembers the name that he assigns to you” because he calls Victoria, Minnie. Another story for another day.)
Michael, or PawPaw, will do anything that Dylan asks of him. I stopped him once as he was following Dylan to the trampoline. “It’s been years since you’ve been on that thing. What about the operation on your knee? What about your bad Achilles tendon?”
“Dylan wants to jump,” Michael said, as his only defense. Thankfully someone else beat Michael to the trampoline, or else he would have been on there with Dylan.
At a recent football game, Dylan wanted a hot dog and I wanted to take a walk, so he reached up for my hand and we walked down the steps of the bleachers. We made that trip three times, and all three times he reached for my hand. And every time that I held it I thought, I would do anything to protect this child. Had he started to stumble, I would have just held it tighter. The only way that he would have fallen is if I had gone down first. I’d like to think that it would have taken something major for me to fall. Like a sniper’s bullet. Or a tsunami. But one misstep would have had the same effect, so I was very careful.
At times like these, when I feel such overwhelming love for this little two-year-old, I am reminded of the love God has for us. While I may not understand His great and perfect love, I am grateful for it. It makes me want to stay close to God and follow Him, so that I can experience the promise of Psalm 37: 23, 24. “The Lord directs the steps of the godly, He delights in every detail of their lives. Though they stumble, they will never fall, for the Lord holds them by the hand.”

Redeeming Mistakes

Ivory soap wasn’t designed to float. Chocolate chip cookies were accidentally developed. A tension spring designed to monitor horsepower on naval battleships fell, and the Slinky toy was invented. Mistakes. All of these successful products were the result of mistakes.
Learning to press on despite what we believe to be failure is a valuable skill. It’s okay to fail, but it’s not okay to quit. Jonas Salk tried 200 unsuccessful polio vaccines. When asked how it felt to fail so many times, he said, “I never failed 200 times in my life. I was taught not to use the word ‘failure.’ I just discovered 200 ways how not to vaccinate for polio.
One of the challenges of teaching art to first graders was turning a perfectionist into an artist. All too often, as soon as one mistake was made, the student wanted to start over. Rarely lacking art supplies, I refused the request simply because I wanted the child to dig deeper and figure out a way to redeem their mistake. I would kneel down next to the student, and we would work together to find a way to make something beautiful out of the mess. We didn’t quit until we had a first grade masterpiece.
In much the same way, I have made a habit of bringing my mistakes to God and asking Him to work through them. I don’t know why I keep messing up, but I trust God to show me how to go beyond my mistakes, learn from them, and even turn the experience into a beautiful life-lesson. Whenever this happens, a song that I heard over twenty-five years ago fills my mind.
Something beautiful, something good, all my confusion, He understood.
All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife, and He made something beautiful out of my life.
Failing to bring our mistakes to the Master so that He can turn our lives into a masterpiece is probably the greatest failure of all.