{"id":4566,"date":"2025-04-21T10:32:51","date_gmt":"2025-04-21T14:32:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=4566"},"modified":"2025-04-21T10:32:51","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T14:32:51","slug":"white-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/21\/white-out\/","title":{"rendered":"White Out"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>

All of us make mistakes.\u00a0

With grace and grit, we can learn from our mistakes.

And then there are those of us who actually earn <\/em>from our mistakes.\u00a0

That brings us to Bette Nesmith Graham, an executive secretary in the mid-1950s for the Texas Bank and Trust.

Bette had a great job.\u00a0The problem is that she wasn\u2019t particularly good at one of its essential components:\u00a0typing.\u00a0In the era before electronic typewriters and word processors, administrative assistants lived with the reality that a single typo on a document might mean starting from scratch.

One year Graham volunteered to help decorate the bank\u2019s windows for the upcoming holiday season.

That\u2019s when she made an important discovery:\u00a0When the artist overseeing that project made a mistake, he didn\u2019t start over.\u00a0He simply covered his error with a dab of paint, waited for it to dry, then picked up where he left off.\u00a0Bette wondered if she might address typing mistakes the same way.

She put some paint into a small bottle, applied it with a tiny brush, and just like that began to experience absolution from her typing sins.

It wasn\u2019t long before her co-workers were standing in line:\u00a0Could she whip up a few more of those little bottles?

Her kitchen became a lab.\u00a0Her garage became a bottling assembly line.\u00a0A local chemistry teacher helped her concoct a superior formula.

Thus was born Liquid Paper (generically known as \u201cwhite-out\u201d), a homegrown product that would put smiles on the faces of accountants, secretaries, and term-paper-typing students the world over.

Graham still made mistakes, of course.\u00a0

One day at work she mindlessly typed \u201cThe Liquid Paper Company\u201d at the bottom of a correspondence instead of \u201cTexas Bank and Trust.\u201d\u00a0That was the last straw. Her boss let her go.

But by that time Bette saw the future, and it wasn\u2019t working at a bank.

By the mid-1970s, her solo business venture was selling 65,000 units a day.\u00a0Gillette bought her out for 48 million dollars, plus a future royalty for every bottle sold.

That was a spectacular moment for a single mom.\u00a0Her teenage son Michael and his pals used to help her fill bottles in the garage.\u00a0America came to know him as Michael Nesmith, the \u201cbrainy\u201d member of The Monkees, the ultimate 1960s teeny bopper rock group.\u00a0

Wouldn\u2019t it be great if our worst mistakes \u2013 our ethical failures, our deepest betrayals, and our most self-absorbed missteps \u2013 could somehow be \u201cwhited out\u201d from our personal stories?

God has a remedy. It appears in David\u2019s anguished plea for forgiveness in Psalm 51.

\u201cHave mercy\u00a0on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion\u00a0blot out\u00a0my transgressions\u2026 Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow\u201c (vs. 1,7).

David begs for his sins to be blotted out \u2013 erased from the pages of his life.

The incredible news is that God\u2019s forgiveness isn\u2019t a just temporary paint job. All of our failures, even our most disheartening ones, were erased<\/em> by the death of Jesus on the cross. And we honor God by believing in our own forgiveness.

We can say with certainty that we will keep making mistakes.\u00a0

But our mistakes don\u2019t have to define us.

Through Christ, God miraculously sees our lives, every new day, as a fresh sheet of paper ready to record the next chapter of our lives.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here All of us make mistakes.\u00a0 With grace and grit, we can learn from our mistakes. And then there are those of us who actually earn from our mistakes.\u00a0 That brings us to Bette Nesmith Graham, an executive secretary in the mid-1950s for the Texas Bank and Trust. Bette had a great… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4567,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[76,913],"class_list":["post-4566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-forgiveness","tag-sins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4566","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=4566"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4568,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4566\/revisions\/4568"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}