May Friday’s agony and Saturday’s despair whisper the comfort that only an incarnated God can give—because He gets what it’s like to be dust and desire and wailing questions.

May the golden moon anchor you to colossal, ancient faithfulness and steadiness. May fresh greens in landscapes remind you that winter is not forever. May wide smiles of strangers and children warm you.

And I don’t know words big enough to bless your Easter, but may light and love shine on your face and dab away your tears. May your heart be strong to run toward the hole that held so much sorrow, and your eyes see folded linen, peace, and power stronger than death. May that power enliven you today.

More than 15 years ago, in a dark season, I made myself start a Thanks Journal. At the end of every day, I’d list at least one thing that I was thankful for, or one way in which I’d felt God’s presence. Sometimes I’d have to sit for awhile before I could think of what to write, which of course says more about me than about God, but other days the list was long.

That daily discipline shaped me profoundly. It was a way to name the goodness that surrounded me. It was a way to fight darkness with light. It was a way to defy the voices that said everything’s wrong and bad and terrible and futile. Some seasons were darker than others, but I could always find goodness and joy and reminders of God’s presence when I looked for it.

Over a year ago, I stopped the nightly list making. I think I thought it’s kinda become second nature to me, and looking for the good is now the shape of my life, and I don’t have to write it down.

That might have been true, but then high summer came and in two nightmare weeks, a torrent of bad sad terrible heavy things hit—bam bam bam bam. Death and cancer and fostering/adoption gone awry and wicked men victimizing children and more cancer and more sudden death. One friend’s suicide was terrible but two suicides in two weeks made me start wondering if everyone is at risk, and are my people ok, and am I ok?

I cried and ranted and wrestled this summer more than I have for a long, long time. The heaviness sometimes kept me from eating or sleeping well. Sometimes I’d breathe deep and think, oh, that felt good—I’ve not breathed deep all day. I had good people to lean on, and lots of tissues, and I wrote awful poems of lament and listened to “Jesus Strong and Kind” on repeat because that was all the light I could hold: Jesus said. Jesus said. Jesus said.

Then I heard wizened teacher Jonas say that God’s favorite word is “Come.” And Jonas described Psalm 23, and how there are enemies all around, but God invites us to a table in the middle of those enemies where we can feast.

In my mind’s eye, I saw werewolves and swords and dark, snarling, evil forms circling a clearing in the forest, and in the middle of the clearing was a table heaped with goodness and a line of lit candles down its center. And me and my people were laughing and talking and singing and eating around it. And I knew that going back to my Thanks Journal habit was a way I could eat at that table.

Remember when Edmund was on the sledge with the White Witch and they came upon the Christmas party, and she saw the party as treason? She hated the feasting because it made a statement about who was really in charge, and that the thaw was coming, and it would soon be Christmas.

Intentional gratitude—feasting in the presence of enemies—never says there are no enemies, never avoids the awfulness that staggers me. It never denies the tears that simmer just under the surface, but it declares that light is stronger than darkness and Jesus says “Come.”

I don’t know how or why God sits on His big beautiful hands and lets people do atrocious, despicable things to children. I don’t understand the fragile hair’s breadth between health and illness and death. I know He weeps too, and our sorrow matters to Him.

I don’t know much more. I just know I need to sit quietly every night and list the good things heaped on the table.

Photo by Natasha P. on Unsplash

When our family hosted guests for Sunday dinner, my favorite times happened when we stayed at the table for hours after we ate, and it wasn’t because of the food. If we moved from the table to sit in the living room or go outside on the grass, the conversation always took a hit. We could never pick up talking where we left off. Even if the chairs were harder and we had to sit straighter, I didn’t mind staying for hours to talk and laugh and sometimes sing.

I don’t know what the psychological term is for this phenomena of how the conversation changes when the location changes but it seems like a thing and it should have a name.

These days, I wish the conversations on-line would move to the dining room.

I keep a carefully curated social media feed because I don’t have time/energy/space for shouting matches. Even so, many voices have disappointed me, scared me, kept me from engaging because it seems everyone is winging caustic words, and if I say anything I’ll be shot down because it was somehow the wrong words or ignorant ideas and don’t I know better? At the very least, don’t I know that THIS ISSUE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD?

I’m grateful for a few gentle, rational voices, but they are very, very few, and to all the others I just want to say “Can we move the conversation to the dining room?”

In the real world, neighbors talk to each other over porch railings, across the street, shout HEY to a pal. It’s ok to raise a voice there but real connection and change doesn’t happen on the street. When the conversation moves inside, however, it changes. Especially when there’s ice cream involved.

We speak differently depending what room we’re in. It’s about boundaries, respect, self-awareness, intimacy. Words, tone of voice, volume all change depending on whether we’re on the street, porch, dining room, living room, or bedroom.

The shrill comments and shouted judgement online have no nuance, no shared history, no awareness of the other. (I exaggerate here to make a point.) The shouting is happening on the streets of the cyber world but we should move the discussion to the kitchen table. What if no one shouted at each other? What if they sat down, talked quietly over Coke and chicken curry, and asked clarifying questions at a civil volume level?

I listened to a lunch conversation where men gave strong, insightful comments about racism and current buzzwords and their connotations. Had the men put their comments on Facebook, they would have been shot down and villainized in 30 seconds. But I trusted their character, I heard the inflection in their voices, I knew some of their back story, and I agreed with what they said.

Those men’s wise, solid voices don’t have a chance on the noisy street or the shouting match on the porch. They matter, and they make a difference, but they’re not noisy and the crowds don’t hear them.

Words spoken at the table are the words the world is starving for, but who facilitates those conversations? Kitchen table conversations are where real change takes place, not comments fired at each other on Facebook. Where are the voices who seek to understand and offer compassion instead of opinions? Where will the shaming stop? It might stop when we eat together.

They’ll know we’re Christians by our love, not by our allegiance to the right or left or our adamant statements.

Let’s move the discussion to the kitchen table. I make a good chicken curry. Come on over!

He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.

St. Francis of Assisi is believed to have said this, and I agree with him. I also feel that God intended all people to be artists with different mediums. Some use words or flour and sugar or plants or ideas or house paint. Creating something that hasn’t existed before reflects God’s creative stamp on us and engages and aligns all the layers of a person, which is why I think everyone should regularly create.

I’ve learned that limited mediums help me create more. If the whole world is my oyster, all the choices overwhelm me when I want to make something new. But when I have only a few choices, I know better what to do. Limitations are freeing and clarifying.

When someone at work ordered a big whiteboard, it came in a box taller than me, so I claimed the cardboard before they took it to the recycle pile. Cardboard is the poor artist’s canvas, and I have a different way of recycling it.

I’d pinned this luscious image on my To Paint board on Pinterest. I’d found it on a blog I follow, which is created by a poet, photographer, and writer.

Here is where most of us artists want to insert disclaimers, before we unveil our work:

What I did is nothing like the picture.

It’s not that great, really.

Someone else could do much better than this.

While all of that is true, I believe there’s something even truer: whenever we create something that didn’t exist before, and if it brings some measure of truth, beauty, or goodness into the world, it’s something to treasure, and not make excuses for. 

There’s always someone better than us, and there’s always something we could’ve done to improve it but there’s so much goodness in the process of creating, in the courage of putting paint on a blank piece of paper or cardboard or wood, that it should keep us from giving much air time to the disclaimers.

Over several month’s time, I worked on this mixed media project. First, I sketched  a rough outline of petals, and swiped the highlights with white acrylic paint to give it a raised texture. When it dried, I propped the cardboard on a chair for my easel and stroked, layered, and blended chalk pastels with fingers and thumbs and palms. Some evenings, I took it outside to work on. I sprayed it with fixative, because chalk brushes off easily, and then saw more colors to add, so I put chalk on top of fixative. I discovered by accident that this really worked well, because the spray gave it a little more tooth, as chalk artists call it, which is roughness of the surface. The cardboard gives it its own texture, which adds to the overall impression.

Some time after it was finished, I came across a line from Robert Capon, and I knew where it belonged, and added it with a gold marker.

Only miracle is plain. It is the ordinary that groans with the weight of glory.

Another way this evolved is when I cut the upper left corner to follow the contours of the flower. This is the beauty of using cardboard. The downside to it is that the paint made it buckle. I painted the back of it to balance it, which helped, but it’s still curved. The other downside to cardboard is that I don’t respect it as much as a canvas, and poke tacks in it to mount it on the spare room wall, which is probably unwise.

I like all the colors and texture here.

I keep it because I don’t want to throw it away yet, but also because of the deep joy in smearing, rubbing, and layering all the delicious colors. Creating aligns my head, heart, and hands so that for several glorious hours, all the parts of me aren’t fragmented or confused, and I feel whole and new. I value the process just as much or more than the finished product, and this artwork on my spare room wall reminds me of how fun and exhilarating that process was.

Quite a long time ago, I saw these paintings on Pinterest. The blue one caught my eye and it looked simple enough for me to do. There were even directions to go with it but I didn’t follow them because I wanted to tweak it.

A year or two later, I came across Conspirare singing Let the River Run, and it moved me deeply. It wasn’t intended to be a religious piece, and “New Jerusalem” wasn’t referring to heaven, but I heard enthusiasm and excitement, a call to dreamers, and bright hope for what will be, which, of course, for Christians includes the new heaven and new earth.

I asked an artistic friend for advice on how to paint a cityscape with a river, and she said to consult Google images and drawings in black and white. That gave me some ideas, so on a hot summer day, I found an empty study room with AC.  I gathered a few paints, a wet rag, several paintbrushes. I found the large 27″x30″ calendar I’d squirreled away for this project, put it face down on a table, and started painting a blush-pink sky: the dawn behind the gold.

My favorite feature is the pink dawn shining where the gold is thin.

I added black to a bright blue paint to make a midnight blue city. It didn’t take long, and it was so. much. fun. I loved the simplicity and the flexibility. If a spire didn’t work out right, I could put gold over it. I messed up the writing, but covered it up by changing the shape of the river. If it’s stressful, I don’t do it, and that’s why my artwork is super simple.

Part of me thinks that if I repurpose old calendars, maybe I should respect my art enough to put it in a frame. The more pragmatic part of me says part of the message is the medium, the thin metal strips stabilize it, and it’s ok. For awhile, I used thick tape on the back side to mount it, but that wasn’t nice in several ways, and now I use tacks, though that’s probably not respectful either.

I like having it on my sliding closet door. To me, it shows the already-but-not-yet that I live in. It promises a golden city coming down someday, but for now we can walk beside its river.

On my desk at work, I have a Willow Tree figurine. She’s holding a spray of red flowers and burying her face in them. The title of the figurine is “Surrounded by Love.”

I keep her there because she reminds me, with her relaxed posture and exuberant enjoyment of the flowers, that I, too, am surrounded by love. It’s in the air I breathe on my walk to work, the flavors I relish at lunch, the laughter I join in.

Now and then, I forget that love surrounds me. I become fretful, touchy, defensive. I think I need to prove myself to my world. I need to control my surroundings to be safe and predictable, because no one else is making that happen.

Those days could be titled “Surrounded by Fear.”

This is not an attractive, restful picture. It’s ugly and obnoxious, and no one would ever cast a figurine of that to keep on a desk.

Here’s a thought experiment:

What would change in us if we lived in the awareness that each of us is truly, deeply, freely loved? That we could never earn or perform well enough to deserve the love that surrounds, covers, carries us?

How would this awareness change how I see my world? How would it affect the way I look at other people, knowing they are loved like I am?

This week, look for the ways you’re surrounded by love. Write them down. Because you see what you look for, chances are good that you’ll come up with an impressive list. If you can’t see anything, ask God to open your eyes to His love. Read I John and Luke to see God’s heart demonstrated in Jesus.

Looking for His love might mean that you see in a shape you did not expect. You might be in for some surprises!

*****This is the first in a series of 4 weekly devotionals that I’ve written for the lovely Daughters of Promise. Sign up here to get all of them in your inbox every Monday!