Perfectly Imperfect

I've mentioned and featured this beautiful visitor a couple of times already. I am all about the tiny ways God chooses to bless me and try to find tangible, daily reminders of His care for me in the tiniest of ways. 

I am always on the lookout for what I've termed "God winks". These are ways I feel like He  shows me how tenderly He seeks out ways to delight me with His goodness.

On a couple of especially lonely days last week, He sent this beauty to hang around my front steps, clinging to the standing phlox my precious daughter planted there last summer.

I spent at least 20 minutes with my phone poised and ready to capture the fluttering and dancing of my unexpected guest. I turned it on "live" mode and caught quite a few shots of her in action.

I held the button down and sent "bursts" of her careening from petal to petal. She was in the midst of my amateurish photo shoot and had no clue. 

She is pretty from all angles, but what I discovered from careful observation and my studious investigation is evident in the first photo I'm sharing. 

She is broken.

She is missing part of a wing.

She is not perfect. 

Her beauty is marred by something missing.

Or is it? 

I am no professional photographer. My phone is not the newest model by a long shot. Yet it saw her--in all her perfect imperfection.

I set out to simply capture a source of beauty. To behold and delight in what I knew my Heavenly Father had sent my way to bring me exactly that. 

He SEES me. 

In the perfect imperfection, He SEES me and you. 

Did I thrust my phone to the ground once I saw her missing part?

Did I huff and become instantly disappointed by the gift of her presence because she wasn't "perfect"? 

Hardly. 

Instead, I welcomed her back the second day with renewed delight at her coming back for another visit!

I think God is the same way with us. 

Hang on with me as I unpack some of my thoughts that are fluttering around in my head as wildly as that butterfly's wings.

He welcomes us in all our perfect imperfections and delights in our presence. He doesn't halt at the imperfections. He doesn't thrust us from Himself or inform us we aren't allowed until we fix whatever is broken.

The butterfly was damaged by something outside her ability to fix. Something happened to her to alter her wing, and she had to just continue flying as if it were still whole. She kept on doing what she was created to do without a care.

I am quite like my butterfly visitor. 

I bear scars, woundedness, and imperfections -- both the blatantly visible kind and the ones no one ever sees. Both the self-inflicted and the ones foisted upon me by others, by my circumstances, by no effort of my own.

I then have a choice. 

Do I continue on with what still remains and do what I was created to do?

Or do I get caught up in what is now missing or flawed and allow that to define me and keep me from accomplishing the purpose for which my Heavenly Father made me in the first place?

He still SEES me. He still delights in my beauty and names me perfect in the light of His son Jesus. It is the only way He can SEE me. 

Once I accepted His perfect offering of salvation, He can no longer SEE me any other way. 

Just as I looked on the butterfly, and saw perfect imperfection in her with no loss of joy or delight in her presence; my Lord declares the same of me. 

I am perfectly imperfect. My purpose is far from thwarted, and I still get to be about the task of leaving a trail of beauty every day. 

Leaving a trail of beauty~

Pam

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