God loves the mistakes

My convictions and beliefs… all correct, of course, no mistakes within my writings. This conviction that the title suggests is probably my way of patting myself on the back and not beating myself up, although I think it is more than this. God actually loves the mistakes we make. So…

Humanity made in the image and likeness of God, in simple language we are somewhat like God, hence a truly authentic humanism can only be a good thing. To see, love, serve and uphold humanity is on a spectrum toward theism. At some level we might also be able to say God is a little bit like us, and in the ultimate human that likeness connected so deeply that Jesus was ‘the express image’ of God.

However (all posts need at least one ‘however’) there is an endowment to humanity that God does not embody, it is the gift of making mistakes (though there are a few ‘regrets’ in Scripture when God considers the mess we have made). Sin is a perversion of how we are to live, mistakes are the markers on my path to glory – or at least they can be. I know Paul wrote about ‘faith to faith’ and ‘glory to glory’ but I think maybe we should also write ‘mistake to mistake’. Mistakes are not the opposite of faith or of glory and I suspect that all three words are pretty closely related.

I debated putting into the title the word ‘honest’ as in ‘honest mistakes’ but I suspect God is considerably bigger than simply including the honest ones. Why a gift to make mistakes? Cos it is at the heart of learning. All learning involves mistakes. No Michelin star chef woke up one morning to stun the guests with her cuisine… a process of learning. Everyone surely can say ‘if I had my time over again I would do it differently’ or ‘I wouldn’t do it that way again’. Stupidity has an amazing ability to be incredibly personal, to manifest in the space that I inhabit. It becomes dangerous when it is over combined with regret. In the moments when inspiration breaks through into my space I realise that I am where I am today because of the path I have come along. If I had done things differently I would be in a different place… but where I am now is the one place I should be in order to go forward – that is a huge privilege.

When our mistakes – including our honest ones – affect others around us negatively regret, apology if possible is in order… but there are mistakes that are simply ours. By all means pause and reflect and positively learn but by more than all means(!) get over them. Move forward, and yes you might make the same mistake again – two or more opportunities to learn.

God gave us a gift, an ability to make mistakes, to get things wrong (some theologians seem to have developed this gift, so says this amateur). And I think God enjoys it when we make (honest) mistakes as we manifest what it is to be human, and if I could only manifest a little more humanness, I might just reflect a little more ‘Godness’.