An Art Story That Makes Me Want to Crawl into a Hole
November 2024: A letter for people who are being sanctified.
Dear family, friends, and Internet strangers,
This letter isn’t one that makes me look very good, but I hope it’s useful for somebody.
I’ve mentioned before that sometimes I get to paint live during our church’s Sunday service. I got to do such a painting in October, for a sermon on John 14:22-31. Those of us who do live art at church generally pray about what to paint (or draw, or collage) and we don’t always illustrate the sermon. I’m a rather literal person, though, and I am more comfortable making something that ties clearly to the message.
When I prayed about painting for that sermon, the verse that stood out to me was verse 27: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” (ESV)
Quickly, I saw in my mind an image of a sheep leaning against a shepherd the way some dogs lean against the people they like. The idea was simple: Peace for the sheep is where the Good Shepherd is.
If you’re reading this and you’re not familiar with Christian imagery: The people of God (the believers in Jesus, now) are the sheep in the fold, and Jesus is the Good Shepherd (see John 10:1-16). Peace, for His people, is with Him—in communion with Him, in prayer and reading the Bible and in worship and in fellowship with fellow believers. He is safety for His sheep.
I do believe this. But I believed it shallowly and intellectually, rarely acting on it.
The week before I was scheduled to paint, I prepared an old canvas that I’d started using for something and never got to finish. I put a new layer of gesso on it, and sketched in pencil what I planned to paint. I took time on the composition. I did a tiny watercolor sketch on paper to get an idea of the colors and to make sure the composition worked okay, which is unusual for me. At the artistic level, I prepared decently well.
That Sunday morning, I was extra tired and running later than I’d wanted, but I got set up toward the side of the stage on time and painted through the entire worship service as planned. I noticed I was rusty at working with acrylic paint, but I knew from experience that panicking would not help. In anything creative, it helps to keep going when it looks bad.
There’s often a point of panic during a live painting when I realize how little time I have left to keep working (a fairly common thing among the live artists at our church, I’m told), but I pushed through to the end of the pastor’s message and did the best I could.
The painting didn’t look quite the way I’d imagined it would, after preparing so specifically ahead of time. I felt the idea had outrun my skills. My head was filled with pointed condemnation for my work.
I typically hold the end result of a live piece more loosely, not planning in such detail, and I pray more while working to collaborate with God. This time, I lost the plot, as they say, on Who I was painting for and what He wanted to use it for. I was relying on myself as an artist to achieve a particular visual end, and I believed I’d failed.
I was pretty persuaded the whole thing was a dud.
I hoped I could explain the piece to the congregation at the end of the service, which is usually an option for the live artist. The meaning of any art isn’t always self-evident, especially when it’s not a literal illustration, and a lot of the value comes through the artist’s explanation.
But this time, it didn’t work out for me to explain it. And I had confidently told our pastor beforehand that this piece is the most obvious one I’ve done—even my most “literal” pieces aren’t clearly literal at a glance, but this is a sheep and a shepherd, at a church service—and that it’s fine if I don’t get to explain it.
Now I was panicking that any chance the piece had to mean anything to anybody was lost.
I did what I usually do when I’m overwhelmed, frustrated, or feeling like a disappointment: I cried. I didn’t stop crying while putting my paints away, nor when people who like me came to tell me they liked the painting. I tried to stop crying when people I didn’t know came to ask me nice questions about it.
I’ve had people tell me that crying when I’m sad is a “gift” (as an adult, not as a child), because our society tends to crush that reaction as we grow up. Alas, I retained the tendency to cry easily and now also feel embarrassment for the perceived social failure. This added to my desire to find a hole and crawl inside it.
Yet at this point, I was physically surrounded by people who care about me, including one friend who went and washed all my paintbrushes, so I was unable to flee the stage without making more of a scene.
Someone—I think one of the other leaders from the arts community, but it’s a blur—suggested they pray for me, so several of us sat down and people prayed. Some said they truly liked the painting, but in that moment, I could see little that wasn’t wrong with it.
What I did see, finally, was my obvious failure to be the sheep in the painting I’d just done, and my own pride.
What I heard in my head, presumably from the Lord, was, “Pride like a kidney stone.”
Ouch. I’ve never had kidney stones, but I hear about them from other people. I imagined the pride in question as a little ball that maybe I didn’t realize was there, maybe didn’t seem very big, but suddenly hurt a whole lot and clearly needed to get out.
These excerpts are from my journal the next day (bold added). They sum up the situation well:
“Live art is worship, not a performance. God can use even a bad painting.”
“I took my eyes off Him and wanted some glory for myself, as an artist. I didn’t ‘keep the main thing the main thing.’”
“I’m embarrassed about my reaction to my perceived failure—which, too, is a symptom of pride. Can I be ashamed or embarrassed if I don’t want to preserve my image in people’s eyes?”
From my perspective, this is a pretty ugly story that still makes me want to crawl into a hole. Yet God still used this painting for good.
Someone from our church came up to tell me that the painting had moved her to tears, based on what God apparently was saying to her through it. (She mentioned it to me again three weeks later.)
One of my friends told me she’d be happy to babysit the painting for the week if I didn’t want to look at it anymore, that it would absolutely bless her to be able to look at it.
I took it home, because I thought I should live with it and see if it looked different later in the week. I put it by the chair where I usually pray and read the Bible.
The painting did start to look better to me when I was out of the situation. More importantly, it reminded me that what I said the painting meant, I didn’t believe deeply enough to practice. The contrast with the puddle of Rae left at the end of that Sunday’s service is evidence enough.
I wander off, like a sheep, all the time and wonder why I’m so anxious. God is not anxious; if my focus is Him, peace wins.
I had gained more understanding that peace is found with the Good Shepherd. Peace in the presence of God, or His word, is a recurring theme in Scripture (incl. Numbers 6:24-26, Joshua 1:9, Psalm 119:165, Isaiah 26:3, John 16:33, Romans 15:13), and now I saw it anew in this image of the sheep.
But that Sunday in October, it hadn’t gone deeper than simple insight.
Something I heard that week in a certain podcast I was trying out (John Mark Comer, Bethany Allen, and Bryan Rouanzoin, “Sabbath 01: Stop / The Rhythm of Creation”, Rule of Life by Practicing the Way, 26 Sept 2022) is that many of us tend to stop when we get “insight”, as if new understanding is the same as change. We don’t always practice what we hear. We think insight automatically changes us, and we move on while the “change” is too shallow to remain.
So now, I am trying to practice looking for God when I notice the absence of peace. My heart races, my thoughts spiral—so what is God saying to me? What is He doing? What has He already said about such situations in His written Word?
I’m grateful God is too good to leave me anxious and proud. I’m grateful He uses other people, and that our church is full of His grace expressed through His people.
In His timing, He appears to be making me more like Jesus. Maybe slowly, maybe I am stubborn, but He is doing His part all the time.
A Good Word
Since it’s November, and still closer to the election than to Thanksgiving, I’m sending a few snippets from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount for those who had uncharitable thoughts recently:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”
“For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
And for myself, as I share these verses:
“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.”
Writing Updates
My friend Tina Marie Cox shared my February letter (with permission!) as a guest blog post this month on her site: Let’s Be Real. You can see it there, check out her own writing, and subscribe if you like it!
I’m working, still slowly, on my novel and editing a client’s book. I also spent some time on a new guest post for Tina Marie’s blog. I hope to share it with you in the next few months (whenever it’s done and she wants a guest writer again, so ETA TBD).
That’s it for this November! If any of this was valuable to you—interesting, useful, or beautiful—share it with someone:
To truth, love, and adventure,
Rae
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