When God Says You Are What The World Says You’re Not
For most of my life, I’ve been told I’m not creative, that art is not my strength. My stick figure drawings are unrecognizable, my paintings are laughable. I’ve never sculpted a thing. Art class in 6th grade turned into a complete nightmare. My attempts at art combined with the words spoken into my life led me to believe that I’d been created by God lacking all artistic abilities and creativity.
My mom can take a collection of scrap materials, and in little time, create a wreath fit for designer magazines. My sister can sit down with photographs and card stock to craft a scrapbook that looks professionally produced. I watch friends with paintbrush and empty canvas. They give little thought to colors and design. Their hands seem to move with natural grace as they effortlessly create works that drop my jaw. I listen to music, feeling swept away by rhythms and melodies I only dream of creating.
I wanted to create art too but accepted that God gave me gifts outside the world of art. I was wrong. God, the Creator of art, the ultimate Artist, endless in creativity, design, and ideas, led me down a winding road to find the artist hiding inside my soul.
When my three boys were babies, I began to document our days on a blog. Blogging began as a way for me to keep our long distance family up-to-date. As time marched on, my writing began to shift from documenting details to connecting God to those very details to encouraging others through the sharing of our experiences.
When I sat at my computer to write, my fingers began to type, and it was like I could sense God sitting next to me. He felt so present. Suddenly, a world that felt chaotic seemed to come into order. As fingers pounded keys, my heart quickened as I heard His whispers. My heart began to crack as I wrote about our life and began to see His fingerprints covering our lives.
Life became a beautiful work of art. God used the art of writing to reveal to me that I’d been creating art all along. I only failed to see it as art. My life is my art. I express art every single day of my life. God had created an artist within me. It just looked different than the artists I compared myself to.
God created an artist in each of us. Shouldn’t I have seen that His expressions of art in each of us would appear drastically different than another’s? The God who created a world of sunsets that render one speechless. The God who created the seasons with their sharp contrasts of life and death. Had I limited His artistic creations within myself?
We make art with our life. Motherhood is art. Friendship is art. Sisterhood is art. Marriage is art. Acts of compassion and mercy are art.
Art is an expression, sometimes an outpouring of the heart, often a magnificent display of God at work. If we look closely, we can see art everywhere. We can see that we are all the creators of art because we have been created by the Creator of art. He has placed us in His masterpiece to create art daily with our very lives.
Art is a gift that grows with practice and use. God used writing, an art I failed to see hiding in my heart, to show me that He had in fact created art for me to express daily through my life.
While my art doesn’t look like the art anyone else might create, He created me that I might express Him through my life. That is art. Whatever the world says about my art, it doesn’t matter, He looked at His creation and said it is very good.
We all are artists, created by the One who created art. While we might not all sing, dance, paint, draw, write, we all create art wherever we are. Art is subjective, to appreciate the art of our life, we have to look for the beauty. What will your art look like today?
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