“Thank God for failure, shattered hopes, lost aims,
And ungained garlands, for he knoweth best.
I longed to win for God and for the truth,
To spread his kingdom over sea and shore,
Struggled–and lost, while others gained their crowns.
Baffled and sore, cast out and left behind–
‘They also serve who only stand and wait;’
Perchance they also win who seem to fail;
God’s eye sees clearer than our earth dimmed sight.”
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 good 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.
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