Painting and obedience to Christ

"My career has been a journey in search of beauty and truth, which come from God. I seek to show His beauty, power and majesty, and my serenity and joy, however imperfectly translated through the talent He has given me. As I paint, I look forward to daily lessons from my Master, Jesus Christ. I hope that you will see Him shining through the work you see here."

Today I begin my web log, which I hope will be one way to keep myself accountable and transparent. Here you see one of my pastel paintings, Smoldering Moment. I really, really struggled with this one! It was twice as large and had a blue sky until one afternoon when I just lost it and decided it would either become a sunset or I'd wipe it out completely! As you can see, the sunset option worked, but I lopped the top half off in the process. I still struggle with painting, even after 25 years as an artist. It's a worthy struggle--but not the most important one in my life, trust me.

Painting is a snap compared to obedience to Christ, at least sometimes. The painting above is sort of loosely symbolic to me. There are days when my life in the Lord seems to need something changed, the way I changed the blue sky to orange and yellow. Yet I know that the reality is that I'm the blue sky or the orange sky or the clouds in God's picture, so it isn't that I need to change myself, but I have to be willing to let Him do the changing. Oh, I know, He will change me no matter what, but the means of change can be vastly different depending on my receptiveness and readiness to bend to Jesus. I'd rather be a blue sky gently wiped away and repainted to orange, than have to go through having the top half lopped off, in a manner of speaking!