Obsess Not About The Mess, Rather Work With It.

Lessons Learned

From Dirt To Treasure

The cousins would come inside exhausted after hours of adventure-having, fort-building, hike-taking fun in the rolling and seemingly boundless country landscape. Each day, a new brilliant chapter would be written by these cousins with imaginations on fire and love for one another bubbling over. Childhood paradise.  Imaginative adventures encouraged and celebrated.  Country life was wide and free and served as the perfect balm and medicine for the nebulous ills resulting from a typical urban rat-race.  One is well aware that imaginative, adventurous, outdoor playing frequently results in substantial rips and mud and scrapes and the occasional poison ivy itch, but one also soundly recognizes that those meager costs are ever so worth it for the infinite creative and relational blessings gained. Cousins with  dirty hands, covered in the happy grim of nature’s playground, would come bolting inside for a short breath-catching,  tummy-filling rest, sometimes finding the soap and water on the way in, but usually not. All adventurers dashing to the basement for ping-pong and an assortment of ice cream treats in the freezer, left their precious outside handprints in all the cousin sizes down the basement stairway wall. Precious handprints that represented love and fun and being together simply could not be washed clean when the cousins went back home. Absolutely not.   Instead, grandma and grandpa began to trace the handprints and color them in with permanent markers including name and date captions thus forever capturing moments and memories in time. It became known as the handprint hall.  Through the years, cousins continued to trace hands, color hands, and date hands as did their friends, guests and all such other important visiting adventurers. Hundreds of hands.  The handprint hall.  Famous. Perfect.  A gallery of rare, beautiful, ongoing art to which we were all connected, all key contributors, all precious. Amazing how a mud-splotched wall, seen as annoying dirt to some, could be seen as priceless treasured art to someone else.  Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.