Gloriously beautiful failure

I learned from my mom really early in life that a mistake has the potential to become gloriously beautiful.

Some of my earliest memories are of my mom painting. I remember her with a paintbrush in her hands, paint on her fingers, or in her hair. In the 90’s she sprinkle painted onto clothes and the paint was splattered around the garage. I as so small looking at my beautiful mom with a smile on her face as she painted on t-shirts, rocks, canvases, wood and crafts.  In fact, my mom painted on almost any paintable surface. She still paints, almost every day.

I remember when we would paint together during our summer breaks from school. She would make salt-dough for us to mold and then paint. Sometimes the figure would be a mess, and she would just tell us to use our imagination. Sometimes we painted on thick watercolor paper, and I was so meticulous that any ‘mistake’ really upset me. She would tell me not to worry, that what I thought was going to be a little flower could now be turned into something new like a tree, or a person.

My big splotches of color could change the entire image and I could just have fun with it. When I relaxed and just followed the paint across the paper it turned into something that I really enjoyed, and even felt proud of. I’ve noticed that my mom was teaching me from her own experience. Some of my favorite paintings of hers are her sketches from her journal, or a painting that was totally different from the original idea or sketch because she accidentally used the wrong color, or the wrong stroke of the paint brush.

I love it. I’ve learned to celebrate mistakes as opportunities. It might be seen as a failure from the original plan’s point of view, but so often I’ve seen these mistakes become gloriously beautiful.

Here’s to letting mistakes become gloriously beautiful failures. 

Missionary Momma Mia