Better Artist

As much as I try to put my own brushstrokes on the canvas of my life… as insistent as I may be to choose my own key for the melody… more often than not I find I am on the dance floor with the music I didn’t expect… handed down a brush dripping with paint not of my own choosing.

Every day, people and circumstances of my life bring an element of surprise which in some way challenge what I think I know.  They call me to go deeper. They force me to step back and evaluate. Realign. And, then, realign again. And again.

This realignment (some call it ‘repentance’) doesn’t happen in the vacuum. For I have the vast solid frame of the written Word of God to keep consistent structure. Psalms and Proverbs. Gospels and Letters. Moses and Daniel. James and Paul. But, even as I find stability in the familiar words, I must watch so they don’t become mechanical…. so I don’t turn them into monuments, or even worse, mallets to hammer people around me with their absolute truth.

Every day I am aware of my desperate need for the Spirit of God to breathe afresh off those pages and fill me from within, satisfying the depths and bubbling up to overflowing with His life.

This brings a truth into focus that is both utterly terrifying and most delightful. For I realize that my life is not a canvas I own on which I finger-paint my own scrawny stick figures.  My life is a canvas that belongs to Him.  This canvas of moments and days, places and people, gifts and abilities, epic failures and blunders - it's all His along with everything else. His paint, His brushes, His image.  

And knowing that He is indisputably superior Artist to any one of us, we can trust that whatever masterpiece He is working on in our lives - messy as it may appear at the moment - it will be awesome in the end. 

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. Ephesians 2:10