Knowing When to Stop
It’s about 6:00 pm. I’m done with work for the day and it’s time to move on to working on a birthday gift.
As I’ve said before, I’m experimenting with air-dry clay right now. I loved how my Christmas ornaments turned out, imperfections and all, so naturally I’m feeling adventurous. Let’s skip the easy stuff and try something more challenging. A little pocket to hang on the wall. Perfect for putting dried flowers in.
I mean… look how stinking cute that is! This one looks like it could be actual pottery instead of air-dry clay, but you get the picture.
This became my next venture. And let’s just say… well mine doesn’t look anything like this. Somewhat because I had an idea for a design that I thought would be cute and somewhat because I don’t know what I’m doing yet. It’s been a challenge just to get my pieces of clay smoothed out. I mean I like little handmade imperfections, but not as many as I have in this piece.
Anyway, I moved on to the painting part last night. I chose the birthday girl’s favorite color. Looked cute. Tonight, I added the words “you are beautiful” on the bottom. Again, not perfect or what I had pictured, but I can live with it. Still cute. Then I decided I had to paint some flowers on it. And you know what that did? Made me think it was too flat and the flowers needed some detail.
Why? Why must I complicate something that was meant to be simple? The first stroke of the black outline was the moment I realized I had gone too far. Why couldn’t I just leave well enough alone?
Why don’t I know when to stop??? And what’s worse is I kinda want to try and “fix” it by adding even more paint to the flowers. I mean… HELLO!?!?!? Can you say delusional?
So now I’ve got this potentially cute gift that I don’t even know if I want to give or not. Maybe she will like it. Maybe not. I don’t know.
I couldn’t find the creator of this cutie or the publisher of the image to give credit.
The point is, this is not the first time I have done this with one of my little projects. I tend to do it a lot. And I’ve messed up a lot of cute stuff because of it. But it got me thinking about how much I do that with life things. Like when I knew God wanted me to walk away from something or give something up, it took me a year to be obedient. Or when I’m trying to be a good friend and give solicited advice, but the other person isn’t receiving anything well but I keep yapping my trap anyway. Or when I spend a season doing church at home because I’m in this weird transition phase and I get too comfortable at home so that season is extended beyond what it was meant to be.
Sounds a little like some Israelites I’ve read about a time or two.
What is it that causes me to ignore that little voice? Stubbornness? Pride? Insecurity? Fear? Maybe all of the above.
So how do I end this vicious cycle? And am I doing it again with this blog?