The Artist

Today I flew into Long Beach from Seattle.  Due to a snafu in ticketing I found myself in row 21, seat C while my wife sat in 13D.  Needles to say, I did not know the young woman who sat down next to me.  She had to either be getting ready to start her senior year of high school or her first year of college. We traded a couple of polite smiles and pleasant nods with one another.  I pulled out the book I was reading and she pulled out a sketchpad.  We then both got lost in our own worlds.

My book was on the how God uniquely forms our souls.  It is a good read and easily kept my attention.  That is why I did not notice what the girl was drawing until I got to the end of a chapter and took a cursory glance down at her sketchbook.  I was amazed at what I saw.  She was working on the hair of what I first thought was a photograph.  I could not help but wonder why she was drawing hair on someone’s picture.  I took a closer look and realized that it was not a photo at all, but a pen and ink drawing.  

(Not Actual Picture, but similar)

She was clearly very talented.

I told her that I was very impressed with her work and I asked her if it was a drawling someone she knew.  She said no, it was someone she imagined. 

What was so amazing was how much soul the person she was drawing possessed.  I could see pain in her eyes.  I could make out desire for something more.  You could see in her face that she experienced hardship, the kind of adversity I could hardly imagine the young women sitting next to me understood. Yet, the way she drew the hair imaged a women who’s harsh expression was only covering up the softness of who she really was. 

All this was formed from nothing more than a black pen, a piece of white paper, and her imagination.

I must have embarrassed her because not long after our short conversation she put her book away and pulled out something to read.

About an hour later, she switched back to her sketchbook and began to draw again.  This time I said nothing, but at the end of each chapter, I took a glance over at her work.

The first time I looked, she had drawn what looked to me to be a caricature of another woman.  It was something I would have expected her to turn into an animated character.  You could make out the expression on the face and had a good idea of what the women would look like, but it was nothing like a picture.

A chapter later, I looked again and saw that she had begun to work on the hair.  It no longer had the feeling of a cartoon, but now looked real.  What I had imagined at first glance as blond flowing hair was now black. She had masterfully woven the stokes of her pen to create the illusion of light bouncing off the black curls.  Though the artist had hardly finished one side of her head and had yet to begin working on the face, I knew that in a matter of time the sketch that lay before her would look as real as the one she was working on earlier.

Rather than turning back to my book, I sat and studied her at  work.  I was amazed at how she patiently made the tiniest of strokes with her pen, one after another.  By themselves, they were just lines on a page.  However, together, they seemed to bend light and give dimension to the hair she was drawing.  It was almost as if she was not drawing, but scratching off a layer of color that hid what was real beneath it.  It was masterful and beautiful to watch.

As I watched, I could not but help make the connection between what I was witnessing and what I had been reading just a few minutes before. 

God too is an artist, masterfully working to reveal what He envisions our souls, who we really are, to be.  We cannot see the full picture.  In fact, it often looks to us more like a random set of scribbles on a page than the patient sketching of the lines that form a beautiful picture that is more real than what we can imagine.

As I watched her, I could not help but think that she is not the only one who had to be patient.  I too had to be patient.  If I refused, and turned away after my first glance of her second drawing, I would have been left with an image of a caricature, rather than the vision of how real the picture was becoming.

This too is true of how God forms us into who we are really to be.  If we get impatient, if we refuse to allow the Creative One the time necessary to draw the lines necessary to bring definition, realism and life, our lives may end up feeling more like a distorted image, a caricature of our real self,  than a photograph of who we were meant to be.

Maybe that is how you feel now.

Be encouraged.  It is never too late to wait for the artist of our souls to reveal to us what is real and seemingly hidden beneath the surface of the paper.

After all, he has already imagined who he intends for you to be, and like the young women next to me on the plane, he has the creativity and skill necessary to bring to life all that he imagines.