Been sitting in my purple metal yard chair watching the sunset this evening. The twilight is cool and beautiful. I thought about this quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — “Softly the evening came with the sunset.” I love the image that conjures up in my mind when I read this quote. Describes tonight perfectly!

Mother Nature painted a orangey red wildfire across the horizon at sunset and stroked watercolors of purple and pink on the near by gathered clouds and “softly the evening came.” Twilight was so quiet tonight I could hear the cardinals cracking open the black sunflower seeds. Just when I relaxed and was enjoying a lightning bug ballet, I see a raccoon crossing the street and running down the driveway. Woe is me! Here we go again!! Putting the trap back out tomorrow.

Before it got dark I walked around and checked for vegetables and zinnia blooms. The sunflowers are getting tall and their buds are growing. Can’t wait to see what colors will bloom first. I planted 15 different varieties. Just mixed them all together and planted a few rows. The sunflowers around the old oak tree and the bird feeders just came up from bird droppings and from the seeds the birds and squirrels raked out of the feeders. When a bird sits on a feeder among the sunshine yellow blooms it makes a pretty picture. Some of the blooms are imperfect — some have just a few yellow petals, some are jumbles of buds that are struggling to open, and some are on tiny stems with even tinier blooms. But, I noticed today there is beauty in the sunflowers’ imperfections.

I’ve been watching this one bloom that only has four yellow petals, four petals perfectly spaced around the tea cup saucer size bloom. And it’s so beautiful with its differences. I think we can find beauty in unexpected places if we realize we can celebrate imperfection. God places us on earth full of flaws. He doesn’t mind our blemishes. He loves us unconditionally and accepts us as we are. We need to accept ourselves as we are, too.

The beauty of imperfection is that it allows us to see our own humanity.

In reality we are all imperfect. Some of us struggle our whole lives striving to be perfect. Happiness doesn’t come from our pursuit of perfection but from our acceptance and acknowledgement of our imperfections. Beauty is all around us, even in broken things we can find beauty. Our scars give us wisdom. Our scars only add to the beauty that makes us unique.

Accepting ourselves as we truly are gives us a focus to look within our lives for happiness and contentment. Happiness is a fleeting emotion but contentment is a sense of peace and satisfaction. God promises through his grace we can endure the hardships and travel around the road blocks in our lives. He will teach us to see the beauty that surrounds us in the imperfections of our lives.

“Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. It means that you’ve decided to look beyond the imperfections.” — Gerard Way