There’s something about the smell of art supplies. The sweet enticement to see just how much of a mess you can make while trying to arrive at the final product of beauty you’ve envisioned. You’re lost in a charcoal haze cut only by the colors in oil designing your hands. With sleeves rolled up, you’re too far in to turn back now. Or ever. The most beautiful thing is that you don’t even have to be a master artist to feel the draw of this practice. This abandon, this fearlessness that comes in creating is as natural as breathing. This artist’s metaphor for life has reminded me recently that there cannot be beauty without there first being a mess. We cannot have new created marvels to behold with first deciding to dive in, inhibitionless. You make the dive with ease, emboldened by the draw of the promise of a glorious end. You may have to fend off a few sharks; dart around, climb over, or squeeze through a reef, or even disentangle yourself from some constricting, clingy seaweed but through and through; this is freedom. Creating is so satisfying, I believe not only because it reflects the character of our Creator, but because it gives us tangible hope that something of beauty - of worth, of significance - will come from the messes that we intentionally and unintentionally make daily. I’m not just talking about art. I’m talking about any endeavor you could possibly take on in your life. I wholly believe that if we don’t create some sort of mess, we are not taking big enough risks.
The mess is worth just as much as the end result but is not always all courage and assuredness. That is why it’s a mess. Sometimes all I can see are the scattered colors and empty paint tubes of the mess and I wonder why this call was even placed in my hands in the first place. It’s in those times that I want to walk away from it all - brushes stuck on the palette, drop cloth on the floor, paint left uncapped, canvass half-finished. But I can’t. With sleeves rolled up, I’m too far in to turn back now. Or ever. With messes come mistakes. Mistakes that I make more than I care to admit, even though I know they bring some of life’s most soul-changing lessons. Yet I am learning that as long as I say, I’m sorry, and mean it, then the mistakes become an accepted part of it all, rather than another source of anxiety or perceived failure. As long as I learned something from my mistake - learned to be kinder, more compassionate, more creative, more humble, more human - then maybe someone else did too. So, it is well. The mess can take you down or you can remember to embrace it. It takes me down when I let it. It fills my spirit to overflowing when I embrace it. There’s just something about fighting for something and being able to stand back in the end, look at it and say, I did that. And it’s good. Sometimes from the mess you get an end-result of an entirely different picture of beauty than you had originally intended. A better, fuller, more freedom-filled picture of beauty that you had originally intended. A picture you never would have created had you left in the middle of the mess. I guess that’s just what happens when you take hold of the freedom that’s in front of you. Side note: Speaking of messes, this is the second draft of this post. I typed the whole first one, fell in love with it and then something happened and I lost the whole thing. Talk about a mess. And irony. Shed a tear or two over it. Still recovering. Trying to embrace it as I read my own words back to me. Wah.
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Author4th grade teacher. Writer. Justice-seeker. Encourager. CrossFitter. John 11:40. Archives
July 2017
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