Unfinished Painting

This morning I read a talk Elder David Bednar gave during the October 2009 general conference entitled, "
More Diligent and Concerned at Home".  I was impressed with the talk when I listened to it in the first place and I've read it a couple of times since.  I read it this morning because we just got the November Ensign magazine and I wanted to see how it felt when it was read from the printed page as opposed to the glaring computer monitor.  (about the same)
It seems to me that the theme of his talk is best illustrated when he relates his and his wife's efforts to be consistent in having family prayer and scripture study and family home evening.  He confessed that their spiritual flights sometimes never got off the ground or bumped to premature landings just like everyone else's do.  He likened the effort of the years to a painting he has in his office of a wheat field in harvest.  Says Elder Bednar, "The painting is a vast collection of individual brushstrokes—none of which in isolation is very interesting or impressive. In fact, if you stand close to the canvas, all you can see is a mass of seemingly unrelated and unattractive streaks of yellow and gold and brown paint. However, as you gradually move away from the canvas, all of the individual brushstrokes combine together and produce a magnificent landscape of a wheat field. Many ordinary, individual brushstrokes work together to create a captivating and beautiful painting."
Well, I have to admit I didn't have the painting perspective when our children were young.  All I saw were the individual brush strokes and as the years went on and kids got older and developed schedules (and attitudes) of their own, which didn't mesh very well with the already chaotic one LeeAnn and I followed, we gradually let our family devotional observances slip from sporadic to rare.  The painting I found to accompany this post doesn't really tell the story since that part that Gilbert Stuart finished was so good it ended up on the dollar bill.  My real painting would look more like an unfinished paint-by-number masterpiece with 50% of the 3's and 5's filled in and a few of the rest of the colors used here and there just to show we cracked the lids of most of the paints.
Dwelling on past failures doesn't pay dividends in the present so I'll just say, "I did what I did and I hope it was better than nothing."  If my kids read this I'll say--read this.  It's what I should have done but didn't have the vision to do.  Learn from my regrets and kick it up a notch or two from the example you got.  You'll thank yourself for realizing that even though your brush-strokes don't look very lovely by themselves, it's the sum of all of them together that makes the masterpiece.
And by the way--thank's for filling in so many of the blank spots on the canvas of your lives on your own--and making me look good in spite of an imperfect job.