Yesterday was one of those days.

My hubby and I were working on a project to finish the new floor in our bedroom. The new flooring looked great but we needed to install baseboard trim. My job was to measure and fit the pieces, while he would do the cutting.

We’ve done this sort of thing before, not only with trim but with wallboard, lumber, plywood, you name it. But this time, I had a faulty tape measure. The pieces kept coming up about 2 inches short. And my husband had misplaced his board stretcher.

Okay, I probably can’t blame the tool. Maybe my eyes were the problem. I would look at the number and see a 6 when it should have been an 8, or an 8 when it was really a 9. Finally, the boss took away my tape measure and gave me a different one.

To top it all off, I went to the lumberyard to buy a piece of trim for the door, which obviously needed to be nearly 7-feet tall, and I brought back a 6-foot piece. But I was sure the right measurement I had taken a couple of days earlier was correct! Hey, maybe it was that tape measure, after all!

A dear friend pointed out that this experience is a good example of life–sometimes we just have faulty vision. We need to adjust our perspective.

Now we see a blurred image in a mirror. Then we will see very clearly. Now my knowledge is incomplete. Then I will have complete knowledge as God has complete knowledge of me” (1 Corinthians 13:12, GW).

If we’re using a faulty tool, whether it’s a scratched mirror, the wrong tape measure, or the false teaching of the world, we’ll wind up with pieces of our lives that don’t fit together as they should. We need the tool of God’s Word and His vision for our lives in order to successfully complete the project He has given us.

My husband and I were able to laugh about the mistakes (actually, he made some, too, in cutting the angles). He had to make some cuts three times but we were able to use the miscut pieces somewhere else–and the project eventually was completed.

Isn’t that what God does? He uses even our mistakes for His glory and our good.

But on the next project, I’ll make sure I have good tools, and I’ll measure three times!