Know-Love-Obey God

For the High Calling Blogs PhotoPlay prompt given by Claire Burge on “the rule of thirds.” (Read the prompt, get out your camera, and join us!)

The Apostle Paul calls it a thorn, but mine feels more like a bruise. The come-and-go ache of an uneven emotional life will return now and then, but I no longer ask God to erase it from my life. I have learned (am learning) that I need this bruise, this chronic under-the-skin pain. I regularly slip into faulty vision; the illusion of self-sufficiency enters the very center of my field of view, so the bruise is my Father’s way of sending me a humility check. It becomes a powerful place for grace to fall, to cleanse, to remain. When my internal life is off-kilter, when my center of gravity keeps shifting, when I am off-balance, God’s abundance fills. In those empty and low moments He meets me deeply, tenderly, beautifully.

My Great-Aunt Mariel is a superb artist. When we visited her in Santa Rosa, California she took us to a Tuscan restaurant in Sonoma and told us thatevery year, she attends the Sonoma Tomato Festival for the purpose of finding scenes to paint. In her home, I was thrilled and amazed to see her studio full of acrylics, watercolors, oils, canvases of work begun. She even makes her own art paper.

A few years ago, Great-Aunt Mariel visited Colorado. One afternoon, she gave us a watercolor lesson. What I remember most from that afternoon: she told us never to put the focal point in the center. In this month’s PhotoPlay photography prompt, Claire Burge tells us something similar: divide your screen in thirds and place your focal point in one of those thirds. In other words, don’t center your image.

Isn’t that where we find beauty? In His grace, God comes into my off-center, imperfect life and transforms it into beauty. He came to heal the sick, to make beauty from the ashes of mourning, to make His grace sufficient in the weak, to turn failures and denials into spiritual builders, to use cracked pots like me.

Both Great-Aunt Mariel and Claire told me. There is beauty and art in the things that are off-center.

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More for “the rule of thirds” (or rule-breaking with two-thirds):

I do appreciate the “perfect” and “flawless” photo, but more often I find it hard to relate. Those kinds of photos are less likely to make an internal connection with me. Instead, I like the beauty of flaws, imperfections, the non-ideal. For example:

A stray petal that didn’t quite make it up with the rest of the blossom:

A beautiful plant with a not-so-perfect name (“skunkweed”):

Getting wet when I wanted to stay dry:

A wrinkled blossom. Crushed, maybe?