Artistry Waiting To Happen

Going with my friends Amanda and Erin to a local painting class called Sips and Strokes here in Knoxville during my two week Birthday Extravaganza was something I had looked forward to for several weeks but actually started with an unexpected profound moment for me.
We met up at S&S eager to have a new experience together and were very excited. We each had picked out a different picture we wanted to replicate, and as the instructor handed us each our own blank canvas I was reminded of a statement I had heard for so many years that says basically "our lives are the canvas God paints His pictures on".
He does paint the stories of our lives on a canvas I think - blank material stretched and ready to receive, awaiting brushes strokes that create the chapters in HIS big story.
But what struck me this day was the blank card I was also handed. The rectangle that was blank and white. A sturdy piece of stock material intended to hold the colors we would use. Our instructor, Will, took us over to the colors in large pump bottles where he would apply to the card whatever colors we were to use, depending on what picture we wanted to create.
I then started thinking that maybe the canvas isn't us. That it actually encompasses so much more. That it mirrors us, those around us, the people and things that impact us, the ones we impact, even nature itself and how we impact it - everything! It all becomes the picture on the canvas. Its the world around us that we touch in some way.
So what I was now suddenly considering was this: that we're actually the colors that make up that picture.
The colors that get stroked, poured, flicked, rolled, and sponged on the canvas. Material that absorbs me. Colors I provide God to dip His brush in.
Because I have free choice maybe I choose the color on even given day, in any given moment by my intent, my actions, my reactions, and my motive of heart.
I can be a vibrant exciting red and orange, soothing green, calming blue, cheery yellow - or I can be a big old blob of dreary gray, an envious or jealous shade of green, a dirty brown, or icky black that gets applied.
We are all vessels that are being used, so now the question creeps in my mind: at any given time who am I allowing to help me be what color?
Its not hard to imagine that my choice and action could mirror itself in color - but am I allowing God to influence me or am I allowing the enemy to "color my decision"?

This weekend at the Extraordinary Women's Conference in Johnson City, speaker Lysa Terkhurst said that the first four letters of the name "Messiah" reminded her that God takes our "mess" and touches it with healing and uses it to make us beautiful.
I am a walking breathing testimony that that is indeed truth :)

2 Corinthians 12:9
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.

I'm praying today that I allow myself to be a lovely color for God's brush to rest on as He paints, but thanking Him that He uses all the colors I can be, irregardless, to accomplish His masterpiece and that He loves me anyway

Marisa

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