When Capitol Records recording artist Chris LeDoux recorded my song Get Back On that Pony I wanted to do something to thank him. He had given me the publishing on the song, which is sort of unheard of in the business when a song has not previously been signed, and that meant I still have 100% ownership in the song. It also meant I received all the writer’s royalties from the album Under This Old Hat and the American Cowboy box set. It’s a music business thing, and suffice it to say he was an anomaly in Nashville.
Anyway, I decided to make him a guitar strap as a token of thanks. My brother knew a Native American woman up in Heber Valley who did lovely bead work, so I hired her to make two strips of tidy Indian seed bead artistry. We walked into her tiny shop and I was instantly returned to the Reservation of my childhood, out in the sandy soil of Fort Hall near Blackfoot Idaho. I inhaled the aroma of smoke tanned deer hide and sage. From her impressive colorful collection of tiny seed beads I chose hues and patterns. She was to make a three-foot by four inch piece, incorporating seven roses into each strip, representing the name of my publishing company, Seven Roses Music. She completed the task beautifully.
That summer, while visiting our family cottage in Michigan, I carefully hand stitched those wide strips of beadwork onto fabric and leather guitar straps. They turned out great. I sent one to Chris and kept one for myself. I still use that strap nearly every day.
The beautiful handiwork of that skilled Native American artist includes, by design, what she calls a “spirit bead”. The spirit bead is a purposeful mistake. It is a bead in the wrong place, put there by design to allow any unwelcome spirits to rise from the piece of art. I am not an expert on this, but I think the theory is that no human is to create a thing of perfection. Only the great God can do that.
In that vein, I am full of spirit beads.
We who claim to be disciples of Christ and who adhere to the tenets of His restored gospel have all sorts of issues with the tidy rows of our spiritual beadwork. At least I do (I should only speak for myself).
There’s a scripture that we believers sometimes get stuck on:
“Be ye therefore perfect,
even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”
(No pressure there!)
I understand, or at least I want to understand, that the translator from King James’ court had perhaps chosen the less perfect word. The adjective “perfect” was used instead of the verb “perfected”. Since we are beings in process I like to think that a verb is better suited in this sentence, though I do not profess to put words into the Savior’s mouth. Some people say the word could also have been translated as “complete.” Either way, the “perfect” is not a hard-fast-final word that fits us in absolute categories.
I personally like to think of it, in grammatical terms, as a passive verb, like I am “acted upon” by someone other than me, like God is doing the perfecting. Goodness knows I am not the one to know what perfect is. But He does. And while we string those little seed beads of life experience on the story of my life, I suppose He allows me to participate, but the truth is, I think more often than not I need to get out of the way and let Him perfect me.
Some of us, a lot of us, either disassociate ourselves from thinking about an end product, or we swing the other way and fixate obsessively on it, banging ourselves on the head for not being perfect. I’d like to set myself somewhere in the healthy middle of that: aware that I am a work in process and I must be aware as I participate in that process, but not obsessed with how far I am from the final product and therefore overwhelmed by how far I have to go.
Each moment of each day is a little seed bead in my personal hand drawn pattern, and if once in a while the wrong bead gets set in place, I suppose that makes me uniquely mine…or better yet… uniquely His.
