I went to help in Danica’s kindergarten class yesterday. My assignment: help coordinate a painting project, and attempt to minimize the amount of paint that children would be wearing after the extravaganza.
One adorable little girl concluded that she was going to paint a picture of Belle. In our house, we have Princess stuffed animals, toys, blankets, and underwear. If they made Princess toilet paper we’d probably have that too. Clearly this budding painter lived in a house very similar to ours.
Over the course of painting, the subject matter changed. “Belle” morphed to “an angel” which transformed into “a penguin angel”. Really. A penguin angel.
I don’t think these transitions were intentional. I think she realized that Belle’s dress didn’t really look like Belle’s dress. It looked more like an angel. So she ran with that. But then suddenly, possibly due to the slip of a paintbrush, the angel had an enormous orange beak. It didn’t really look like a heavenly angel. It looked more like, well, a penguin angel.
I admired her creativity and ability to be flexible with her plans. She was confident, and didn’t get discouraged that her penguin angel didn’t look like an angel that didn’t look like Belle. She was so proud of her picture.
Another little boy got really discouraged when he saw the end result of his painting. He thought it was too messy and the blobs of paint didn’t look like anything. I explained to him that there are many very famous painters who have made millions of dollars from their paintings, and theirs were messy and their blobs of paint didn’t look like anything either.
I learned important lessons from these kindergartners yesterday. 1) Its okay if things don’t turn out exactly the way we want them to. 3) Even when we make messes and ugly blobs of paint, we have a Creator that still loves us, no matter what. 3) Sometimes we make mistakes, but we just need to get over it, do better next time, and move on.
We can take our slip-ups and turn them into a beautiful penguin angel.
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