Completing Our Masterpieces

Oh, my friends. My dear reader friends. I am inching ever closer to the end of my intensive revisions of the manuscript. Every week I add another stack of pages to the "finished" pile and watch the "to-do" pile shrink. I can see the end. It's out there; up a few small hills, hugging the horizon, waiting to greet me. Not that it's the true end. It's only another necessary phase of the work. Next up: an out loud reading of my novel to find mistakes and weaknesses overlooked by the eye but noticeable to the ear. Still, it is an end. It is a finish line I've been striving for since the start of 2016.

There are times I tell myself to calm down about it all. I fill my brain with warnings about expectations and hopes and dreams. They're dangerous.

Wasted warnings; it can't be helped. This manuscript is my masterpiece and I have to treat it as such. I don't know if it will be a masterpiece in anyone else's eyes but it is in mine. That fact means it needs to be offered to others. That's the latest lesson I've learned.

My almost three year old son often returns from the sitter's house with a new piece of artwork. He is invariably proud of them. This includes those that are purely his, that don't show evidence of how much the sitter helped him but rather look, plain and simple, like the work of a toddler. I arrive home from my workday and he hands them to me with his head held high and a hint of wonder in his voice as he announces, "I made that!" They are his masterpieces. Even when I have to ask him to interpret the picture before I can see the train or the truck or the dog, they are his masterpieces.

Masterpieces aren't meant for the maker alone. They are meant to be held up for anyone to see. At risk of rejection and criticism, indifference and even cruelty, they are to be offered. Because maybe my masterpiece might make another person's day better; maybe it could plant a seed of faith in what is good and true and beautiful; maybe it could edify the heart and mind of a person brought low by lesser things. It could make someone laugh deep in their gut like we all love to laugh. It could bring joy or insight or inspiration. You never know. You never know.

We're all capable of masterpieces. We were designed to provide masterpieces to the rest of our human family. Each unique; each requiring vulnerability and courage. When we create them, we know it. As we are filled with the urgent need to show it to someone, risks be damned, we know what we have created. Want to know why Facebook and YouTube and Instagram are so absurdly successful? Because we long to share our masterpieces with the rest of world. That's not what we are doing most of the time in those mediums but it's a large part of what drives us to use them at all.

My masterpiece might end up only being a masterpiece in my eyes. Or, at most, the eyes of those who love me dearly, much like a toddler's indecipherable depiction of a train. In the end, that's not what matters. What matters is the completion of the masterpiece and it simply is not complete until it is offered to others.