My daughter asked if we could celebrate her 29th birthday at a paint-your-own-art studio. Armed with more confidence than my non-artistic self should have, I selected a colorful abstract design of a woman wearing a colorful hat to paint on canvas.
The first step was tracing the lines from the picture through carbon paper onto the white canvas. Then, our instructor handed me a black marker so that I could go over the tracing lines and said, “This will help you not lose sight of the design while you’re painting.
Ready with my pallet of paint and step-by-step instructions, I dapped the brush in the first color and turned toward the canvas. Many sections needed to be painted, but I focused on one section at a time, careful to stay within the black lines. Each set of instructions directed me to paint in different areas of the canvas.
Satisfied that I could proceed, I encountered my next challenge: blending. This technique scared me because I was afraid to put two separate colors on the brush for fear of losing the distinctness of each color. Blending blurred the security of those black lines I’d carefully traced earlier. I had a terrible time blending!
My instructor picked up another brush and showed me with her expert hand how to blend a little of each color on the brush. As she blended, the black lines disappeared but were replaced by the glorious melding of this-and-that color, which was much more in harmony than the hard edges I wanted to hold onto for my comfort. She explained that blending was essential in painting because it creates interest and depth when two colors twist together without losing their individual qualities.
In life, we create a picture in our minds of what we think our lives should look like. We picture a specific type of job, house, or family. We fall in love with that picture because we believe it will make us happy. So we set about to create that picture on the canvas of our lives, carefully following the rules we think will produce our desired image.
Yet, life doesn’t stay within our neatly drawn lines. Jobs are lost, the doctor delivers bad news, till-death-do-us-part ends in divorce, or your teenagers tear apart your heart with their rebellion. Our human impulse is to use control to push everything and everyone back into place.
How do we hold the good and bad and trust God with both?
Thankfully, God specializes in blending!
“And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.”
Romans 8:28 NLT
I’ve heard Christians refer to this verse as a promise that God squares up everything sad and wrong in their lives. But this verse isn’t an individual promise; Romans 8:28 is a full-picture reflection of the goodness of God, who has seen the full scope of human sin, pain, loss, death, and grief, and He promises eternal healing and restoration for humanity in the end. It’s hard to see the complete big picture of God’s eternal plan because our lives are limited. One scriptural author observed this:
“Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.”
Ecclesiastes 3:11 NLT
At one point, I became confused when I compared my painting to the sample because there were so many lines. The art instructor offered an important insight: “When you’re painting up close for a long time, it’s important to take a step back to see the entire picture.”
She was right! When I took a few steps back, I looked at the whole picture. I could see all the different colors popping with visual interest. The pinkish red contrasted with the lapis blue. I assumed that the titanium white didn’t have much to offer because I was painting on a white canvas, yet the brilliance of that color added a highlight effect that made the other colors pop.
Just like I had to step back from my canvas to see how the entire picture looked, Romans 8:28 assures us that God sees the complete picture of time and humanity from before the world began to our eternal forever.
When our picture of how we believe our lives should look starts to change, we can take comfort in God’s blending power. He can take what’s hard and heartbreaking, the broken and the beautiful, and somehow, in His way, God brings meaning, purpose, and even peace.
We don’t have to fear when our lives don’t look how we planned because our Master Creator knows how to take our messed up and messy lives and make a masterpiece.
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