a perfect heart

"Mommy, wook, I drew you a heart!!"

My 4.5 yr old was more then excited to show me this just now. He drew a heart. 

I absolutely LOVE when he draws me something. One of my favorite things with him. He's becoming quite the artist. I think I teared up when he handed this to me. 

The more I looked at it, my initial thought was I need to teach him how to draw his heart a little better. It's the graphic designer in me. But it's also my human nature to want it to look right, to look perfect. 

In my child's mind, his drawing is perfect. He sees a heart. He doesn't see that it's got scratches where it shouldn't and extra bumps. That it's a little long and not quite proportional. He sees it for what it is. And he's proud of it.

I think sometimes I do this with God. I come to Him with what I think is a beautiful heart, proportional and put together exactly as it should be. But God gently reminds me of the scratches and the extra bumps, not to make me feel bad or to shame me, but to lovingly remind me that my heart can only be made perfect through His. My heart can only be healed because of His. No matter how much I erase the scratches and try to even out the lines and make it look symmetrical and perfect, that as long as I'm doing the erasing I'm just going to rub the paper raw and lose all sense of what my original drawing even resembled. 

But if I give it to Him, He'll fix it. He'll erase the scratches, heal the bumps, 

and make it symmetrical again.