It is snowing this afternoon, covering the brown, sandy roads and stained snowbanks with a fresh, downy coat, and my thoughts turn to white-out. Did you know that in a medical record, it is illegal to correct errors with white-out? That a mistake must be lined out and initialed instead? How humiliating, you might think; if I leave the mistake visible, people will know that I messed up and had to fix it! People will think I'm not smart. I could be held accountable for something I wrote by mistake and never even acted on...
Humans love to cover their tracks. We'd love it if all our mistakes were edited away, leaving only perfection behind. We live in a time of easy fixes, and we expect them. If we make a typo, we hit the backspace key and it's gone. If we get our hair done and don't like it, we choose a different color. If we wreck our car, we take it to the body shop, and voila, perfection once again. No one ever has to know we made these mistakes.
But some mistakes can't be whited out. The mistaken decision to drive drunk may leave behind a wheelchair (yours or someone else's) that cannot be hidden. The decision to shoplift (if signs in fitting rooms can be believed) may leave you with a permanent criminal record. The decision to cheat on an exam may cost you your college career or a job opportunity.
The drive to white out the mistakes has costs, too. When I try to appear perfect, who knows what person is put off, a person who might need my encouragement as one who has "been there" but can't recognize me as such. When I white out my mistakes, I'm also denying their existence to myself, shoving them down under layer after layer of cover until I think I can't see them anymore. But you know what happens with white-out; after a while it starts to flake and crack, and you can rub it off, revealing what is behind it.
Today I resolve to not use white-out. Am I suggesting that we all introduce ourselves with a litany of past mistakes and sins? Not at all. Neither am I suggesting that we keep ourselves from healing from things in our past that have hurt us deeply. But let's line out those things in our minds instead of trying to mask them with white-out. Let's not forget the process of healing and the opportunity to minister to others because of it. And let's not forget that none of us is perfect and cut each other a little slack. Mercy. Receive it. Give it.
God's grace and peace to you.
2 comments:
This is a test of sending comments to your blog.
Too true. Especially as I edit this comment LOL ! Its sooo easy to correct a mis-thought , or mis-step when it is confined to an email that remains Unsent, but once we get in the habit of editing out everything in our lives that may be undesirable or less than perfect it does Supersize the "Egg on face moments" as there is sometimes no where to hide ! These times are designed to remind us that we are not supposed to control everything that happens but rather learn from them and move forward. If we could magically erase all of our imperfections , and actions how boring would that be ??? !!!
Post a Comment