What’s In Your “Oops Box”?

What’s In Your “Oops Box”?

I was recently reading about creative activities to do with my kids. One of the things that I came across was called an “Oops Box”.

What a great idea – an Oops Box is a box wherein you toss scraps of paper or fabric and other small trinkets and things to be repurposed into a craft with your kids…or, into a beautiful work of art.
[photo by Mimi Schirber]
Repurposed. I love that word, “repurposed”. Another great idea. More scraps of things in my life need to be repurposed into something beautiful. Sometimes I feel like – I need to be repurposed. Especially now, as I approach forty years, something like the halfway point in my sentient life.

At this point in my life, I certainly have an “Oops Box”. One full of scraps:

– On the inner level, of parts of my character that need to be refined and parts of my heart that need to be knitted back together with the whole
– On the ideal level, of pieces of dreams yet to be repurposed and realized in the second half of my life
– On the practical level, of parts of projects left undone, that I will someday get back to…letters to write, poems to complete, places to organize.

I look forward to sitting down with God someday and asking Him to take me through my “Oops Box”. I hope He will show me what New Thing He is doing in and through me with the scraps things from my past that I struggle to make sense of today; degrees earned, work experience attained, relationships forged – or lost. What is it all for? Where is all of this taking me?

I look forward to these times of refreshing; of feeling renewed in my life and it’s purpose.

I see the time coming, though I don’t feel I’m there yet; to this place where all my leftovers can get “repurposed” and made into something new, something better, something now.

I guess being present is the closest I can get to repurposing the scraps in my life now. And, to the extent that I am present to my life, and I’m taking it all in, I give the scraps of the past new expression and purpose in the present.

Otherwise, if I don’t do this, what is the point of the past? Is it to bolster the present? Or move us toward the future?

The things I once gave my time and heart and effort to, they look only like scraps and loose ends in my life now. What purpose have they?

Day by day, incrementally and sometimes imperceptibly, I seek to make the world a better place. I do this today by being open, to feeling my place in it, feeling grounded in my place in this world. Then, this is where my faith comes in and nudges me forward with hope; I believe God is using the cumulative of my past to help weave together His and my future. And this gives me a hope in a good future.

By trying to be present to my life, to God and to what God is doing by me, through me and with me,

By trying to be open to God, to inviting him into any and every aspect of my life,

By trying to see and seek God, and to go where he is already at work,

I hope to repurpose all the shining trinkets and shadowy scraps in my life present and past, and all the seemingly loose ends in my “Oops Box”.

What’s in your Oops Box?