Painting a New Year

I love that look when she paints
with freedom in the task
and beauty in the mess.
Too many eyes
see the mess and not the beauty.
I made a lot of mistakes this past year
that make me cringe and
tempt me to a hermit life on Walden pond
But this new year will live up to it's name.
No more obsessive resolutions
that make the finish line smaller on the horizon.
No more instant replays of conversation failures
that lead to resolutions of silence.
No more imperfection searches
like a long line airport annoyance.
No more spinning clock hands
of trying to saw the sawdust.
No more debris swept under the rug
because maybe the real monument is in the rubble.
Take this mess and
Paint a new year with me
move me like a brush
to reveal whatever You have in mind
and as messy as it might seem
help me to rest and call it beautiful.


"There is only one way on God's green footstool that the past can be constructive, and that is by calmly analyzing our past mistakes and profiting by them--and forgetting them . . . don't try to saw the sawdust." Dale Carnegie

"We are meant to be living monuments of God, that our lives would be something that people point to and say "that's what God looks like". The whole world's watching and they have no idea what God looks like unless they see it in you." Jason Miller (paraphrased from New Community Message 1/3/08)

"The stone the builders rejected
has become the capstone;
the LORD has done this,
and it is marvelous in our eyes.
This is the day the LORD has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it."
Psalm 118:22-24

"God has given us not so much the colors of a picture as the colors of a palette. Be he has also given us a subject, a model, a fixed vision. We must be clear about what we want to paint." GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy