Charlotte Holmes Murray
9 x 12 Mixed Media
As I come to the end of 2010 I am reflecting on the fact that I have never had a busier year of my life: From weddings to funerals, from stretches of time at home to many long trips, from the planting of our garden to the raising of chickens, from art classes and art shows to having the Studio and our home on an Arts Council Home Tour - Phew! It has been B-U-S-Y! And it has been good - very good.
This most recent painting, completed this week, actually sums up the whole year as it represents for me the mystery that is our existence: precious and precarious. We hold onto life gently and reverently and we wait: sometimes with great anticipation and other times with dread. My nest series continues to fascinate and intrigue me as representational of "the home" and all the ways we embrace a place of refuge. We are writing a history. It will be read by someone... and very often by those that we didn't even know were reading it.
I look at 2010 as the year that had a "mind of its own" and though at times I feel like I was just "along for the ride" it held for me many of the keys to a journey that I love more and more with each passing year. It is a journey of faith. Faith that is absolute truth and absolute mystery: It is why I love Jesus...
"who being in the form of God thought it not robbery to
be equal with God but made Himself of no reputation and took upon
Him the form of a servant and was made in the likeness of men..."
The key for me this year has been to embrace the mystery of our journey of faith and allow God to be God. There is no vacancy in the Trinity and I do not have to have all the answers. I can trust in simple faith that God is in His heaven and all will (ultimately) be made right with the world. I do not have to do it. (This fall I was enjoying some painting time while in St. Augustine and USA Today carried a front page headline: "What America Thinks about God." I thought to myself - Isaiah 40 - and promptly began a new artwork on the concept of the world and God. Read Isaiah 40 and see what you think about the world, America! It is not going any where until He says so. )
Thankfully, EVERYTHING is not a mystery. Some things God has clearly revealed in His Word. If we do not obey what we DO know, we cannot expect to be handed any more light for things we don't yet understand. Deuteronomy 29:29 is my favorite on this subject - and I will close the year with this:
The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.
Amen and Amen.
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