Painting in Blood

Beneath my bare feet, the sidewalk cools my skin contrasted by the sun warm on my left cheek. Before me, at arms length is a man, dark hair in loose curls, ears obscured, bearded jaw moving in conversation that I can't understand, for he's not talking to me. The rolled sleeves of the untucked shirt, cover hairy arms that have known labor. He stands looking at a canvas preparing to create, he lowers his brush into.....his left hand, from which an occasional drop of blood falls to the pavement below. There's no wound, at least none that seems to diminish his pleasure enough to cause the grin in his eyes to disappear. He dips the brush into his palm, running the bristles of the brush up his wrist and with a fluid motion, draws a vivid red liquid to the canvas. He's painting in blood. His own. A line here, a stroke there, the polished wet color shimmers beautiful on the white canvas. I join the others now, growing in number, who have stopped their hurried lives to watch a creator. This wasn't scheduled and these people have things to do, yet they stand. Stand and stare at this man painting with the blood of his own hand. The picture takes form and with each new stroke now, the newly created form of a tree on the canvas does something quite unexpected. It grows leaves. Leaves on each branch. Small leaves that, once grown, fall away from the painting to the sidewalk below. He picks one up and hands it to a man not yet fifty but teetering on a cane clearly frail and weak. Words of instruction are exchanged and the man places the leaf to his tongue and once he does he's weak and frail no longer. The group becomes a crowd, many now waiting their turn, breathless reaching, gently clamoring for the leaves that fall to the ground with each brushstroke of crimson life. He turns to his left and looks directly at me and says, "My creative power is all about life, and my creativity released through you with both gather life (nods his head to reference the crowd) and release life (nods his head in reference to the healing happening all around us)." As he turns back to the canvas he playfully says, "Are you ready?" I am now far more interested in the future I have been drawn to dream into, than I am in the present moment for I am conscious of a creative force within me that screams to be free. I awaken, barely aware that I have slept.

A friend asked me recently for thoughts on four subjects. Since it feeds the ego to be asked ones opinion of anything, I took the bait. Not because my ego is starving, but because I wondered if I even still have opinions on these things, all of which I've wrestled with, against, or for. I'll leave it to you to figure out which.

Religion: Is flawed, but people embrace religion because they realize they're flawed too. So there's something beautiful about the people who embrace this flawed cancer of religion. It's when religion embraces them that things get ugly. Isn't it interesting that the only people that ticked Jesus off were the religious? If being religious was the way to get close to God, the Pharisees would have been Jesus best friends. God loves people but doesn't seem to have much good to say about the systems we create that confine Him or keep people from Him. God's wrath is aimed at whatever interferes with His love.

Emotion: Can ruin your life, but if you have none then life is already ruined. Jesus healed people when He was "moved with compassion." It's how you respond to emotion and the actions that you take in that response that reveal so many things about the deepest places in you. Watching a normally stable person struggle to take a note as their dead pen gouges the paper is a great way to see that under the right conditions, (even one so simple) everyone can feel....again.

Addiction: It's jumping out of an airplane with a knitted parachute, helpless against the thrust of descent. It's a butterfly battling against a hurricane. Paper wings in the storm you never imagined could be so strong. It's embracing a habit that is growing tired of you. When you can love and hate just a few breaths apart. It's the final scene in Oz, where the tin man is still an idiot, the lion is still afraid, you've given up on the wizard, and all you want to do is to go home. It's staring at an army of zombies. Too many monsters, so little ammunition. All of these charming paradoxes...

that keep us from knowing...

when it's ok...

to breathe.

Addictions remind us of how helpless we are without the relentless affection of a Saviour.

Our World: God loves it and died to redeem it, and only He knows why. I'm so glad He is.... I'm so glad that He just "is".