“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” -Scott Adams (Creator – Dilbert Comic strip)
I’m told that a batting average of .300 (which in baseball is considered extremely high) means that a guy only gets a base hit about thirty percent of the times he’s at bat.
A medical professional recently told me that the reason medicine was called a “practice” is because it's comprised of “guesses based in scientific facts.” This revealed the medical arts to be much more inexact than I might like to think.
Richard Rohr, a Catholic mystic, says that we come to God much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.
The more maturely we look at failure, the more we realize that we need it. Failure is the context by which we are reminded of our humanity, and leads us to proper understandings of our need for mercy.
I have learned a great deal from those proverbial strikeouts – that seventy percent of the time (or more) that I swing and never hit anything. I’ve had to recalculate many times in the course of my life when my guesses (based on what I thought were facts) didn’t yield the expected result. Allowing myself to accept my mistakes, not to mention trying to determine which mistakes to keep and call “art,” is a recent hurdle for me.
Most confounding of all has been the notion that I can be drawn to God more from doing it wrong than by doing it right. To see God creating his art from what I believed to be my greatest failures is watching his mercy in action. Our brokenness is where mercy finds us, but it isn’t where mercy leaves us. Mercy flows much more freely from me when I live in a reality that constantly reminds me of my need for it.
Mercy allows me to reclaim myself and release those that I’ve held hostage in the prison of my own resentments.
Mercy is walking through the wounded world full of broken people and watching what we thought were mistakes—those shattered little pieces of life--become beautiful mosaics in God’s hands.
--For more practical articles on leadership for choir directors and worship leaders, go to discoverworship.com
