| J.R. MIller | Page 6 |
Some people keep compassing regretfully the mountains of their one year’s mistakes through all the following year. They do little but fret over their errors all the months which they ought to make bright with better things, nobler achievements, loftier attainments. But what good comes of it? Worry undoes no folly, corrects no mistakes, brings back nothing you have lost. A year of fretting sets you no farther forward. The best use you can possible make of last year’s blunders is to forget them, and then to get wisdom from the experience for this year. Remembering them, keeping them before you in painful regret will only make you less strong for avoiding them hereafter. To err is human. We learn by making mistakes. Nobody ever does anything perfectly the first time he tries it. The artist spoils yards of canvas and reams of paper in mastering his art. It is the same in living. It takes most of a lifetime to learn how to do work passably well.
There is a way also by which our mistakes may be made to work good for us. We can so deal with them that they shall be made to yield good instead of evil. We know well that many of life’s best things in character and attainment have come out of follies. We owe far more than we know to our blunders. One day Ruskin was with a friend who, in great distress, showed him a fine handkerchief on which some one had carelessly let fall a drop of ink. The woman was vexed beyond measure at the hopeless ruining of her handkerchief. Ruskin said nothing, and took the handkerchief away with him. In a few days he brought it back, but ruined no longer. Using the blot as the base of a drawing, he had made an exquisite bit of India-ink work on the handkerchief, thus giving it a beauty and a value far beyond what it possessed before it had been blotted.
There is a strange power in the divine goodness which can take our mistakes and follies, and out of them bring beauty, blessing, and good. Forget your blunders, put them into the hands of Christ, leave them with him to deal with as he sees fit, and he will show them to you afterward as marks of loveliness, no longer as blunders, but as the very elements of perfection. Forget your mistakes and turn northward.
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