Ojalá, Selah, Lateda

Trusting Prophecy and Talking about It

When I first decided I wanted to have a blog the idea was to have a place to share via the written word as well as the visual image. I expected to write regularly about what was going on in my life, what I was reading, and what I was thinking about in general. I imagined I would share drawings here and there. In October of 2007 when I started this thing I wasn’t doing much in the way of “real” art, most of the images I created were doodled on post-it notes while I was supposedly busy “designing” yellow page ad after yellow page ad. Then came Illustration Friday. IF was an amazing way for me to start purposefully making art again and then actually share it. My posts became more and more just my responses to whatever that Friday’s post was, which was was fine. However for some time now I have been aware that I wanted to start actually sharing words here again. There has been a lot going on in my life and so many mornings as I write to myself in my journal I think that whatever it is I am writing might be worth sharing in this form. I have a thing about starting though. I feel like coming back to write should start with a bang. I should start with “Today is the first day of the year 2010″ or “Today I quit the job I’ve had for nine years,” or even “Today I started the Daniel Fast.” But those days have come and gone. It has been 87 days since the year started, 77 days since I quit my job, and 15 days since I started the Daniel Fast. Not a round number amongst them, but hey, a girl has to start somewhere. So here I am writing despite the fact that I have no dramatic “today is” kind of news.

There is a lot to say about quitting my job and doing the Daniel Fast and how the two are related, but today I want to share a sculpture I finished a few weeks ago and entered in a local juried art festival. It is called Trusting Prophecy and is built of paper maché on top of an orange juice bottle. I didn’t use any paint in its decoration, other than some ribbon and a rock, and that orange juice bottle, all the details are made of paper. I must admit that when I entered it, along with 5 other pieces in the Cumming FUMC Festival of Arts I thought it would surely be accepted in the show and maybe even win a prize. However I was wrong. Of the six pieces I entered only one was accepted in the show and the author of the acceptance letters made a point of letting us all know that they had  worked hard to make sure each artist had at least one piece accepted. The fact that Opinion (Proverbs 15:28) will be in the show is a consolation prize that did not make me feel any better. I think I would have rather had all my pieces be rejected out right and pretend the show never even existed than to have to show up to drop off my little piece on second hand canvas board to the show, attend the opening, and watch someone else win the prizes. My first reaction was to spew as much venom as the Aztec looking soul in the accepted piece. I wanted to rant and rave that the people in Cumming, Georgia don’t know anything about art anyway, to justify my rejection by deciding the show was probably going to be full of watercolors of kittens and daisies in rustic buckets anyway.But that is not what these pieces are about. Proverbs 15:28 says that,  “The heart of the righteous weighs its answers, but the mouth of the wicked gushes evil,” and the prophecy I cite in the title of the paper maché piece is from Exekiel 36:26, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” This piece of art truly is a visual expression of my prayer to love people better, to have a heart that is made more of flesh than of stone. Perhaps its sole purpose was accomplished just by its being made. Perhaps it was too personal to be shared in an art show, even a church sponsored one. Or perhaps the purpose was to have this rejection, this humbling, to remind me of how much I still need to be praying this prayer and trusting in this prophecy. At least I believe I am heading in the right direction in this spiritual journey of mine, perhaps this whole experience will even bring me a step closer.

Recovery for Christmas

Recovery: Acrylic on Wood, 8.5 x 12 inches

A week and a couple days before I left for Christmas vacation a friend asked me if I would do a painting for her to give as a Christmas present. She wanted a painting to celebrate a friend’s recovery from alcohol addiction. When she first described it to me I imagined one of those pictures where Jesus rides shotgun in a big rig. I tried to explain that no matter the subject matter a painting by me would be in my style, and that I wouldn’t be offended if she wanted to look for an artist better suited to what she was imagining. But I was intrigued and started making sketches. I sent her the sketches and she liked them so with just a week to get it done I accepted the commission. I wasn’t sure if I could get it done with so much else to be done for the holidays but I think the pressure actually worked in my favor. I finished writing part of Psalm 18 around the border just minutes before she came to pick it up, and a few hours later the kids and I left town for a week.

We decided to use the verses from The Message translation. It is very powerful…

 ^16-19 But me he caught—reached all the way
from sky to sea; he pulled me out
Of that ocean of hate, that enemy chaos,
the void in which I was drowning.
They hit me when I was down,
but God stuck by me.
He stood me up on a wide-open field;
I stood there saved—surprised to be loved!

^20-24 God made my life complete
when I placed all the pieces before him.
When I got my act together,
he gave me a fresh start.
Now I’m alert to God’s ways;
I don’t take God for granted.
Every day I review the ways he works;
I try not to miss a trick.
I feel put back together,
and I’m watching my step.
God rewrote the text of my life
when I opened the book of my heart to his eyes.

-Psalm 18:16-24 (The Message)

..sigh…

I worked over 70 hours last week while my children were in North Carolina for Camp Cousins. Everyone is back now, the book is at the printers and I was given yesterday and today off to recuperate, but I can’t seem to. I still feel exhausted and rather cranky. I haven’t done anything on my to-do-list except take Sophie for her before-school check-up and as that involved holding her down for 3 shots to the leg that wasn’t very motivating either. I feel oh so very blah. I’ve read 2 books on Christian mediation so far this summer and I have started a third that is broader in scope, more about meditation in general, and less aligned with any one religion. I am fascinated with the idea of being able to quiet the mind, of reaching a place where all you can feel is God and that He is Love, and the peace that the practice is told to bring. After years of meditation Easwaran says…

“I can tell my mind what to do… [and] it obeys. If a craving should arise for something my body does not need, I smile and say politely, “Please leave,” and it leaves. If something big tries to move in – say, an angry thought – I don’t bandy words; I say plainly, “Out!” It goes immediately. “

and

“If you begin to slide into a depression, you simply change your mind – you have learned how – and restore your equanimity and cheerfulness. You can now think what you want to think, and every relationship, everything you do, benefits enormously.”

I feel like I’m on the verge of discovering a way to greatly enhance my spiritual maturity or of sliding down a slippery slope of new-age self-help guru-craziness that will result in quite the opposite. Well, perhaps that a slightly over-dramatic way of putting it. I honestly don’t think that learning to quiet my mind is going to make my loose my Christian faith. However the tension between confessing Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation and having respect for the wisdom of other world religions is very real for me. My mind tends to go in a liberal direction even as my lifestyle gets more and more conservative as the years go by.

(I read a fascinating passage in the book The Tipping Point either last night or this morning about heavy smokers and their personality traits. I think I could make a convincing argument that the “tipping point” in my change from the person I was in the mid to late 90’s to the person I am today was quitting smoking. If I ever get to the point where I can tell my mind what to do and it obeys I will have myself write an essay, or blog, or whatever about just that.)

Anyway, the essence of what I think I sat down to write about is that the idea of being able to actually tell my mind to let go of something and have it obey, to be able to decide that I am just not going to feel “blah” anymore and then get on with my day is absolutely captivating. It almost sounds like a supernatural power to me. I am worried that in seeking to explore how I might get to that point I could be distracted and “forsake my first love.” I need to remember that my focus should not be just learning to better manage my mind, but to do so in order to better love the Lord my God and my neighbors as well.

Ok, so I have just put on Lincoln Brewster’s “Love the Lord” and read the back on my book and noticed a quote from Henri Nouwen saying, “This book has helped me a great deal.” I feel much less blah already.

A Quote

The art of praying, as we grow, is really the art of learning to waste time gracefully—to be simply the clay in the hands of the potter. This may sound easy—too easy to be true—but it is really the most difficult thing we ever learn to do…. This is the real reason why so few of us ever come, in this life, to the full experience of God’s love for us.

- Thomas H. Green “When the Well Runs Dry”

Dining Room Furniture

When my family moved from Cancun to Dawsonville we couldn’t bring much. We brought some boxes and some suitcases but most everything was sold before we left. The only piece of furniture we brought with us was our dining room table. It was the first piece of furniture we bought as a young married couple an it really is lovely, hand-carved and heavy. Last winter it cracked as the weather turned cold and all the humidity left the wood, but this summer it has swollen together as it sat all alone in the room that is called the dining room. It is missing a piece that fits on the top and we didn’t have any chairs for it. But I like it sitting there, like a symbol of where we’ve come from, our journey. So now we have some chairs and I’ve been meaning to share the story…So, not this past Saturday, but the one before that I was home alone and it was cold. Not frigid, but coming out of a long hot Georgia summer it felt pretty cold to me. I was sitting on my couch with my Bible, my journal and the study I’ve been working through. I really wanted to take advantage of the empty house but I kept being distracted by feeling cold. I had on what I felt was enough clothes and we are trying to wait as long as possible before turning on the heat for the winter, so I decided I would go outside and stand in the sun. The sun was warm. It felt good. I kinda wandered around my yard a bit. I looked at my sorry excuse for a flower garden and I pondered how to get my ivy to grow in a different direction and I was observing my half-painted mailbox and wondering if I was ever going to finish it when I saw the chairs. Four chairs sitting in the sun at the end of the driveway two houses down. Now in Mexico its common practice to put anything you no longer want or need out at the curb and by the next morning, or sometimes within mere moments, someone who needs that very thing will come along and pick it up and take it away. It’s such an accepted practice that one has to be very careful not leave anything still wanted out in the open for anytime at all or it will be gone. I don’t think its as common here in the US, at least not in places where I have lived, but when I saw the chairs my first thought was that the chairs were unwanted. But then I realized that I live in the United States of America at the end of a quiet street in a middle class neighborhood in a very small town. People do not drive by looking to see if anyone’s trash will be their treasure. I decided maybe they had been put outside in the sun to air out from a spill or some mold or something. I walked over closer to see what I could see.There were four chairs, very used but still solid, almost a matched set. Wood with upholstered seats and cane backs, more traditional than modern but kinda funky. I looked around, no one else was out soaking up the sun. I was feeling pretty convinced that the chairs had been put out for me, they weren’t exactly what I’d been hoping and praying for the past year and a month but extremely close. But I certainly didn’t want to steal them. So I took a deep breath and walk up the neighbor’s driveway, which is rather long, and rang their doorbell. It took a long time for the man of the house to answer and when he did it was pretty obvious he had been asleep. He seemed a bit confused by me standing there and I felt awkward but I managed to ask if the chairs were unwanted and he answered that they were and I said I would like to take them and he said ok. So I thanked him and apologized for waking him and walked back down the driveway. The chairs were just heavy and awkward enough that I had to carry them home one at a time and I was not cold at all by the time I was done. They fit in the dining room quite nicely. They need to be sanded and primed and painted and decorated and the fabric on the seats will need to be changed, but they are cool chairs and I think they will look quite nice in shades of blue. And that’s the whole physical story of the finding and claiming of the chairs, but it’s not really the story I want to tell.The story I really want to tell as how this had had an enormous spiritual impact on me. I don’t really know how to share, because it all seems kinda weird. But I had been praying for those chairs and I absolutely feel like God purposely provided them to me. Just typing it out makes me feel odd. I think I may have to explore this in a later post.