Masterpiece In the Margin: See Beyond the Mistake

I make mistakes—a lot. My kids even have a running joke about my tendency to run into stationary objects with my vehicle. It’s true; there is a fresh dent, a new scratch, and a crack in my car’s frame to prove it. I just can’t seem to get it right, and every time I walk to my car, I am reminded of my error. My misjudgment, my distraction, my overstep, my impact. It feels like a permanent scar etched into my mind: I make mistakes. I’ve joked that I should get a punch card at Auto Collision Specialists; I’m on a first-name basis there, and I feel like I’ve earned a free sandwich for my “excellent attendance” by now. 

I dabble with coloring with pens and markers as a guilt-free escape. But every project has a mistake—at least mine do. I choose a palette, but somewhere along the way, I misplace a marker. One small stroke and the error is permanent. Erasing it would only smudge the picture, and trying to cover it up just draws the eye to the mismatched texture. But if I keep going, the mistake eventually blends into the whole. It becomes unnoticeable to everyone—except me. 

I pass that mistake over and over as I finish the page, obsessing that everything is ruined. In my head, I scratch that error deep into my being, using every new stroke of color to confirm my lack of perfection. When I finally finished, I looked at the mess. “It looks awful, right?”

You can see it, can’t you? You can’t stop looking at the mistake. 

Oh? You don’t see it? It’s all I see. Let me point it out to you.

It’s very obvious…are you still not seeing it?

My daughter looked at it and said, “Wow! That looks so good, Mom”. She didn’t see it. Even when I pointed it out—the blue that should have been red, the yellow line that touched the dot—she just said, “You don’t notice it at all”. How could she not notice? It was all I’d thought about for thirty minutes! 

That is life: a self-absorbed obsession with our own imperfections when no one else is thinking about them. In the big picture, the moment of a mistake is hardly anything. By overthinking, I act as my own prosecutor and judge, wasting the energy I should be using to move on. 

In the end, I have to catch that unhealthy spiral and be kind to myself. I wouldn’t say these things to my children, or even an enemy. I do make mistakes, but I am not a mistake.y children or anyone I love. I don’t even think I would talk to an enemy the way I talk to myself. 

I do make mistakes. But I am not a mistake. Ephesians 2:10 “For we are God’s masterpiece, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”