The ornament was beautiful.

A few years ago, a local company had come to Cole’s school one day and helped all the kids in his class paint their own ceramic Christmas tree ornaments. Then the company took the ornaments back to their shop where they put a glaze on them and mailed them to the parents about a week before Christmas.

The ornament we received had Cole’s handprint in blue paint. Amy hung it on the tree, so that it could easily be seen.

That was the problem.

Cole saw the ornament a few days later and wanted it. As he reached for it, he told me that he wanted “to show it to me.”

I told him to leave the ornament alone. I told him I could see it just fine without him taking it off the tree. He pulled his hand away and went about doing something else.

About half an hour later, I left the room. A few minutes after that — yep, you guessed it — I heard a crash. I immediately knew what had happened.

I hurried back into the room to find Cole’s beautiful ornament was now in dozens of small pieces, absolutely destroyed.

This event illustrates what sometimes happens in our lives. We notice something we want. We want to touch it, to hold it in our hands, to have control over it. It may be a situation, a relationship or our own lives.

Our heavenly father warns us to leave it alone. Trying to grab it will only result in its damage or its irreparable destruction.

We hear him, we really do. But we can’t help but think we can handle it. We can’t help but think we know better. We can’t help but thing we can do better than he can. So when the next opportunity presents itself, we latch on.

Yet, we learn all too quickly God was right, and we were wrong. Even with the best of intentions in mind, we soon find ourselves staring wide-eyed at a shattered relationship, heart or life. We wonder how things could have gone so horribly wrong.

They went wrong the moment we thought we knew better than God.

Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.”

If we do this, we will avoid much of the heartache in life that is of our own making.

The Rev. Parrish Myers is a local minister living in Braselton. His column appears biweekly in Sunday Life and on gainesvilletimes.com/life.