Unpredictable Paths of Grace

When you grow up like I did, you try to know-it-all. Everything depends on it. Supposedly.

It has been a long time since "growing up", but still some strange place in your head never quite forgives you for not holding together what was never in your power to hold together anyhow— your parent's marriage, hoped-for joys of holidays and ordinary days quashed by volatility, or some other such thing.

Trying to be right, to know it all, brings the need for control; after all, it's so much easier to be right when you understand the playing field, have set the boundary lines yourself, inasmuch as that is possible.

Then along comes Life with a suggestion: let go, drift. In May's The Wisdom of Wilderness: Experiencing the Healing Power of Nature, he takes this suggestion and experiences Creation as it is. There's a sense of encounter, immediacy, Presence that May cannot control.

For one year, I too felt such an invitation. Let go. Drift with golden grasses, morning dew, the stars. Then it came to an end, partly because my commitment was finished, but perhaps too because God knew it was time to set me in a new place of encounter, where I could not easily be in control.

Thus, my art pilgrimage, which I cannot explain in an authoritative way. On this pilgrimage, I work in media I never used before (soft pastel) in a form (abstract art) that I have virtually no experience producing.

At some point I must have wanted to relinquish the burden of being right, knowing-it-all (it is tiring, often perplexing). And this desire sent me on unlikely journeys— first into Creation, now into Art. As a Christian I would not have predicted such paths. Aren't there more "Christiany" travel plans God should have suggested?

No, I could not have predicted the importance of Creation and Art in my grace journey. But maybe this surprise is part of relinquishing the burden too.

"Falling" in soft pastels, by L.L. Barkat.

OTHER BOOK CLUB POSTS:
Glynn's In White Tanks
Monica's Stars and Sunrise