{"id":4123,"date":"2024-10-24T07:03:12","date_gmt":"2024-10-24T11:03:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=4123"},"modified":"2024-10-24T07:03:56","modified_gmt":"2024-10-24T11:03:56","slug":"happy-little-accidents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/24\/happy-little-accidents\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Little Accidents"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, <\/em>click here<\/a>

He spent 20 years of his life screaming his head off.

As a drill sergeant, he was (in his own words) \u201cthe guy who makes you scrub the latrine, the guy who makes you make your bed, the guy who screams at you for being late to work.\u201d

So when he honorably retired from the US Air Force in 1981, he resolved he would never raise his voice again.

Thus master sergeant Robert N. Ross became Bob Ross, one of the most calm and quiet figures ever to appear on public television. For 11 years he starred in a series of 30-minute shows called The Joy of<\/em>Painting<\/em>. The self-taught artist dared to make us imagine that we, too, might produce something beautiful in just half an hour.

Since succumbing to cancer at age 52 in 1995, Ross has become almost a cult figure, rivalling Fred Rogers as someone whose gentle presence seems to lower the blood pressure of faithful viewers.

After growing up in Florida, he was assigned by the Air Force to a unit in Alaska. Ross was overwhelmed by his first glimpses of mountains, glaciers, and rugged pine forests.

Almost all of his paintings \u2013 Ross estimated he created about 30,000 of them \u2013 depict Great Northern landscapes. He rarely painted human figures, and only occasionally added a log cabin or evidence of human habitation in the wilderness.

He utilized a \u201cwet on wet\u201d technique, rapidly adding new colors and images instead of waiting for the paint to dry.

Ross became famous for suddenly announcing, \u201cLet\u2019s add some happy little trees,\u201d whereupon an entire forest might appear on the canvas in a matter of minutes.

He typically wore jeans and a plain-looking shirt, warmly addressing the camera as if he were mentoring a single aspiring student.

Ross loved the fact that when he stood before a blank canvas, \u201cI can create the kind of world that I want, and I can make this world as happy as I want it. Shoot, if you want bad stuff, watch the news.\u201d

And his signature hairstyle? Ross was actually not much of a fan. After leaving the military and the never-ending need for crewcuts, he decided to save money by getting a perm. When the public began identifying him as \u201cthe guy with the crazy hair,\u201d he realized he was stuck forever with his frizzy coif.

Not a single Bob Ross original hangs on the wall of a major art gallery, and his paintings rarely show up at top-rated auctions. Nevertheless, their value continues to spike. One is publicly available right now for just under 10 million dollars \u2013 which isn\u2019t too bad for 30 minutes of work.

Did he ever get flustered before the camera and make mistakes? 

That happened often enough that he even had a name for them: \u201chappy little accidents.\u201d

With a few strokes, Ross would adjust the picture, potentially transforming an errant blob of paint into the most interesting feature on the canvas.

But that\u2019s nothing.

God the Artist is able to transform our most forgettable moments \u2013 the relational misstep, the cruel remark, the mind-boggling lapse in judgment \u2013 into things that reflect his glory.

\u201cAnd we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose\u201d (Romans 8:28).

To be clear, many of the things that happen to us are not good, in and of themselves. And our worst mistakes should never be confused with virtues. But in the context of a loving and trusting relationship with God, disasters can become breakthroughs. \u201cAccidents\u201d can become turning points.

And more often than we can imagine, when we choose to look back and revisit the mistakes of our past, we often see something in the overall picture we had never seen before:

Hope.<\/em>
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here He spent 20 years of his life screaming his head off. As a drill sergeant, he was (in his own words) \u201cthe guy who makes you scrub the latrine, the guy who makes you make your bed, the guy who screams at you for being late to work.\u201d So when he… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4124,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[827,351],"class_list":["post-4123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-accidents","tag-providence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4123"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4126,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4123\/revisions\/4126"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}