A Difficult Obedience

I used to paint, first in oils then acrylics. For a few years I made my living selling paintings, usually wildlife in a mountain setting. I can remember starting a picture at lunch and the next thing I knew my family was home wanting supper. My time at the easel flew by and nothing else even came to mind, never mind got done. Yet as the children needed more of my time and our frequent family moves made it difficult to find time to paint, I set it aside.

They say artists express their creativity in many ways and that is true for me. I decorated and redecorated, took up other crafts, and now am making quilts, but those tubes of paint, blank canvases, and paintbrushes still call to me. Every time I am in an art supply store, I feel emotional in the aisles that sell them.

For the past year or so, I’ve been cleaning out all unused, unnecessary items from our house. We will eventually need to downsize and someday perhaps move into something smaller, so I’ve tossed or given away carloads of stuff. However, when it came to my art books and art supplies, I cannot even go through them. I’ve not painted for years and reasoning says if I’m not using them, I might as well not have them, but the paints and brushes and books seem almost sacred, certainly untouchable. This year I finally managed to give away a box of art books, but kept twice as many.

This week in the mountains meant time alone while my husband golfs. (I can golf, but I just drag down his game, so seldom go.) I decided that I would take my art stuff and see what happens. First I wasn’t sure if I even remembered how to do it. Second, I wondered if I would even enjoy myself, or was it just the memory of enjoying it that haunted me? I also realize this seems silly to those who have not experienced anything like it, but I had to find out if this was still a skill and also if it mattered enough to take it up again.

I also prayed. When I gave up painting in the first place, it was after an extended period of using art sales to support a missionary couple. When they retired from the field, it seemed that God was saying to me, This is not for you. You cannot paint for yourself and make an idol out of this. Now I want you to lay it aside. With other important commitments at the time that was not as hard as it might have been.

So here in the Rockies, I painted a small landscape yesterday. I choose something fairly difficult, with buildings, trees, and water in it. A lake is always difficult to paint. It tends to look humped in the middle and the water looks too heavy. I worked from about 11:00 in the morning to about 3:30. When Bob came back from the golf course, we were both amazed at the result.

This painting is likely the most pleasing one I’ve ever done. The perspective, sense of distance and the colors certainly surpass my older works, and the water . . . it is flat, glassy and looks wet, like you could skip a stone on it. I am still startled. I didn’t expect to even remember how to mix my colors, but everything happened almost instinctively. Oh my Lord, now what am I supposed to do?

Now this is the odd part. I didn’t really enjoy doing it. I also thought afterward that now I knew that I could still paint, it would be easy to set the whole thing aside and never bother doing it again. But I still prayed for God’s direction and when I read my Bible reading for today, a different thing happened in my heart.

For a long time, each day that I ask God a direct question, my daily reading gives me a direct answer. This is what I read this morning:

If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple. And whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it—lest, after he has laid the foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going to make war against another king, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is still a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks conditions of peace. So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple.

The gist of this and that last sentence made me suddenly feel like Abraham at the command of God going up the mountain to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Only instead of the faith Abraham had to believe God would give the lad back to him, I am thinking I must totally forsake this.

Part of my conflict is with the words of my mother. When I was young, she encouraged my artistic endeavors and told me that even the Bible says we must use our talents (referring to Jesus’ parable of the talents where servants were trusted with money, or talents, and commended for increasing what they had or condemned for burying it in the ground). Her application of this parable to my life has made me feel guilty, even pushed me to do many things for which people say I have talent. Getting in over my head and becoming far too busy finally taught me that I am supposed to first ask, What does God say?

God told Abraham to give up the most precious thing in his life, Isaac. We read the story from beginning to end and are encouraged by Abraham’s faith and obedience because we know that God wouldn’t let him kill the boy, but instead provided a substitute. How would we feel if we didn’t know the rest of the story?

That is something like I feel. I know that for Abraham the whole thing was a test. God said to this man, “Now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me. . . . because you have done this thing, and have not withheld your son, your only son—blessing I will bless you, and multiplying I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore; and your descendants shall possess the gate of their enemies. In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice” (Genesis 22:12, 16-18).

I know this is a test for me too, but it would be much easier if this little painting looked like a garage-sale reject instead of something I can hang on my wall with joy and smile every time I look at it. God wants to know what I love the most and I need to know it too.

I also realize that loving Jesus the most does not mean that He will give my sacrifice back to me like He gave back Isaac. I cannot offer this whole painting thing to Him with that in the back of my mind. Instead, He asks me to simply give it to Him, to do with as He pleases whether that means He will ask me to use it in some way for Him, or He will burn it with fire and ask me to forget all about it.

Sometimes obedience is awfully difficult.