The Beauty of the Imperfect

The Beauty of the Imperfect
From Timeless Grace Gems
By J. R. Miller

Most of us fret over our faults and failures. Our imperfections discourage us. Our defeats ofttimes break our spirit and cause us to give up. But this is not true living. When we look at it in the right way, we see that the experiences which have been so disheartening to us, really contain in them elements of hope and encouragement.

There is beauty in imperfection. Perhaps we have not thought of it - but the imperfect in a godly life - is really the perfect in an incomplete state. It is a stage of progress, a phase of development. It is the picture - before the artist has finished it. It is beautiful, therefore, in its time and place.

A blossom is beautiful, although compared with the ripe, luscious fruit, whose prophecy it carries in its heart - it seems very imperfect. The young shoot is graceful in its form and wins admiration, although it is but the beginning of the great tree which by and by it will become. A child - is not a man. How feeble is infancy! Its powers are undeveloped, its faculties are untrained - it is yet without wisdom, without skill, without strength, without ability to do anything valiant or noble. It is a very imperfect man. Yet who blames a child for its incompleteness, its immaturity, its imperfectness? There is beauty in its imperfection.

We are all children of greater or lesser growth. Our lives are incomplete, undeveloped. But if we are living as we should, there is real moral beauty in our imperfectness. It is a natural and necessary process, in the unfolding of the perfect.

A child's work in school may be very faulty, and yet be beautiful and full of encouragement and hope, because it shows faithful endeavor and worth improvement.

A writing teacher praises his scholars, as he inspects the page they have written. He tells them, or certain of them, that they have done excellently. You look at their work, however, and you find it very faulty indeed, the writing stiff and irregular, the letters crudely formed, and you cannot understand why the teacher should speak so approvingly of the scholars' work. Yet he sees real beauty in it because, when compared with yesterday's page, it shows marked improvement.

So it is in all learning. The child actually walked three steps alone today - and the mother is delighted with her baby's achievement. These were its first steps. A little girl sits at the piano and plays through the simplest exercise with only a few mistakes, and all the family are enthusiastic in their praise of the performance. As music it was most meager and faulty. If the older sister, after ten years of music lessons and practice, were able to play no better than the child has done - there would have been disappointment, and no commendation. The imperfect playing was beautiful because, belonging in the early stages of the child's learning - it gave evidence of faithful study and practice.

A mother found her boy trying to draw. Very crude were the attempts - but to her quick eye and eager heart, the figures were beautiful. They had in them the prophecies of the child's future, and the mother stooped and kissed him in her gladness, praising his work. Compared with the artist's masterpiece when the boy had reached his prime - these rough sketches had no loveliness whatever. But they were beautiful in their time, as the boy's first efforts.

The same is true of all faithful efforts to learn how to live. We may follow Christ very imperfectly, stumbling at every step, realizing but in the smallest measure, the qualities of ideal discipleship; yet if we are doing our best, and are continually striving toward whatsoever things are lovely - our efforts and attainments are beautiful in the eye of the Master, and pleasing to him.

In the New Testament, a distinction is made between perfection and blamelessness. We are to be presented faultless at the end, before the presence of the divine glory - but even here, with all our imperfection, we are exhorted to live so as to be unblameable. That is, we are to do our best, living sincerely and unreprovably. Then as Christ looks upon us - he is pleased. He notes many faults, and our best work is full of mistakes - but he sees beauty in all the imperfection, because we are striving to please him - and are reaching toward perfection.

There is a home of wealth and splendor in which the most sacred and precious household treasure, is a piece of puckered sewing. A little child one day picked up the mother's work - some simple thing she had been making and had laid down - and after a half hour's quiet, brought it to the mother and gave it to her, saying, "Mamma, I's been helping you, 'cause I love you so." The stitches were long, and the sewing was drawn and puckered. But the mother saw only beauty in it all, for it told of the child's love and eagerness to help her and please her. That night the little one sickened, and in a few hours was dead! No wonder the mother calls that little piece of puckered sewing, one of her rarest treasures. Nothing that the most skillful hands have wrought, nothing of greatest value among all her household possessions, means to her half so much as that piece of spoiled stitching by her child.

May not this be something like the way in which God looks at his children's humblest efforts to do things for him? We are well aware how faulty even the best Christian work done in this world must seem to our Master - how full of unwisdom, of unbeauty, how foolish much of it, how mixed with self and vanity, how untactful, how indiscreet, how without prayer and love, how ignorant, how ungentle. But he does not chide us for it, does not blame us for doing so imperfectly, the sacred things he gives us to do. No doubt many of our poor blunders, our most faulty pieces of work, are held among our Master's most sacred, most cherished treasures in heaven!