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: The Big Picture
A carpenter once told me that the best carpenters are the ones who know how to disguise their errors well. If you've ever built anything, you know how that works.
I recently built a new grape arbor. When I finished, I knew where every bent nail had been that I'd had to pull and re-nail, where every board that didn't line up perfectly was, where every unevenness and imperfection could be found. And yet, the grape vine on the arbor is growing vigorously, trying to spread out over it, and everyone who has seen it exclaims about how nice the arbor looks. They don't know that I made errors, nor would they likely even FIND more than one or two if they looked very hard.
That's the real test of the construction. Does it WORK? The arbor is strong and should be able to stand long after I'm gone. It fulfills everything I actually need of it, and then some. Even the cats approve of it as a new place for them to sun themselves. In the end, what do the imperfections matter if the structure fullfills it's purpose, and no one but the builder knows or cares about the errors that occurred during construction.
Isn't that pretty much the way our lives go, too? Too many of us focus on the errors, the mistakes and the imperfections and ignore what we've built overall. Maybe, just maybe, what you've built of yourself and your life looks a lot better to the people around you than you think, because they see the whole structure and don't know, or care, where the errors are.
Stand back and look. You may be a better builder than you give yourself credit for.
A carpenter once told me that the best carpenters are the ones who know how to disguise their errors well. If you've ever built anything, you know how that works.
I recently built a new grape arbor. When I finished, I knew where every bent nail had been that I'd had to pull and re-nail, where every board that didn't line up perfectly was, where every unevenness and imperfection could be found. And yet, the grape vine on the arbor is growing vigorously, trying to spread out over it, and everyone who has seen it exclaims about how nice the arbor looks. They don't know that I made errors, nor would they likely even FIND more than one or two if they looked very hard.
That's the real test of the construction. Does it WORK? The arbor is strong and should be able to stand long after I'm gone. It fulfills everything I actually need of it, and then some. Even the cats approve of it as a new place for them to sun themselves. In the end, what do the imperfections matter if the structure fullfills it's purpose, and no one but the builder knows or cares about the errors that occurred during construction.
Isn't that pretty much the way our lives go, too? Too many of us focus on the errors, the mistakes and the imperfections and ignore what we've built overall. Maybe, just maybe, what you've built of yourself and your life looks a lot better to the people around you than you think, because they see the whole structure and don't know, or care, where the errors are.
Stand back and look. You may be a better builder than you give yourself credit for.