A Lesson from St. Therese

By Britney

At our house in the Finca, we have a little room that we emptied out to make room for prayer. To be honest, I hated it for a long time. There were no chairs and it had a lot of gecko poop and too many stark white walls. I had to do something about it if I was going to have to sit in it every Monday morning for the next year. So I started daydreaming. The patroness of our house is St. Therese, the Little Flower, and I dreamt up a mural of her as a child surrounded by roses and lilies and little wildflowers. I showed it to my roommates and they gave me the go ahead.

Then, I did the terrifying task of inviting the other missionaries and the PAVI painting kiddos to help me. The perfectionist in me didn't want to give up my dream to kids that I'd only seen paint roses once (and not well) and missionaries of various skill levels. The artist in me knew that beauty comes from letting go. Little did I know, that this little project would turn out to be one of the most fun things I've done all year. It didn't turn out perfect by any means. But the cool thing is, it brought us together. We spent Thursday afternoons, missionaries and kids together, with bachata blasting through the speakers, seven of us lined against the wall paintbrushes in hand, laughing, painting, singing, and creating.

There are a lot of flowers that you can tell were painted by kids and it's not exactly uniform, but I think St. Therese would've preferred it that way. She used to say this: "If all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would no longer be enameled with lovely hues. And so it is in the world of souls, Our Lord's living garden." She knew that the beauty of each one of us is that we aren't uniform. Young, but wise beyond her years, she could see that our uniqueness allows us to fill up God's garden with new colors and ideas and approaches that make it a perfectly imperfect masterpiece. In painting her face in our little chapel room, I got to see the message of her life come alive.