Master Artist

While visiting in Oakland with our son Jon, he and his girlfriend Kelly decided on a drive away from the city for all of us, through rolling green hills to Santa Rosa and then to explore the area around Tomales Bay because both Jon and Kelly had an appetite for oysters.  My husband and I didn’t participate in the oyster tasting, although Jon and Kelly both indulged. What captured us most though was the stop in Santa Rosa to visit the Charles M. Schulz Museum.  In so much of what was displayed, it was like taking a walk back through my own lifetime, and yet seeing much through a different lens.  Schulz had a friendship with Tom Everhart though and each had a mutual respect for the artistic talents of the other.  Everhart became the only person in the world authorized to create original paintings of Snoopy, Charlie Brown, and all their friends.  Visiting the museum, I saw some of Everhart’s work and I was immediately fascinated.  I turned a corner into a large open room, and the wall to my right was ablaze with rich, vibrant colors splashed on a canvas that was taller than I was and its width was more than  twice its height.  The immediate reaction was that a kindergartner had been palm painting or maybe foot painting and had just run helter-skelter around the canvas.  And then I began to slowly walk backwardsstaying attentive to what seemed to dramatically evolve before my eyes.  The splashes and streaks of paint began to take on a form that was neither fully realistic nor fully abstract, and a dejected Snoopy was sitting at the table, his meal before him.  

Tom Everhart does it as an art form, but God does it all the time, and He does it especially with the things that don’t seem to make any sense.  They evoke the “Why, God, why???”  And up close,  the colors seem far from vibrant.   They are the grays and the blacks, stabs and slashes of paint disfigured on the canvas of your life.   Random.  Meaningless.  Confusing.  The hurtful.  The strained relationships.  Words of accusation.  Disappointments.  Failure.  Loss and emptiness.  Whatever color is momentarily seen is quickly muddied.  Any significant form seems to run off the page.  You strain to grab the brush and paint your own picture, but your strained attempts are futile.  And then, somehow, some way, you begin to step back.........  and you find the greatest artist of time and eternity has wrapped His arms around you, and He is drawing you still closer to Himself.  He is whispering gentle assurances and He places His healing hands on your blinded eyes and allows you to see what only He alone could see before.  The canvas suddenly has meaning and purpose and beauty.  Some of the canvas is still somewhat shadowed, but you have seen enough to know the Master Artist is at work.  Hope has been birthed.  Your nothingness, your barrenness, your heartache – they all begin to offer something unique you can give back to the Master.  God works in different ways, but it is the same God who does the work in all of us.  By the grace of God I am what I am.  We are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.
And the dejected Snoopy?  In the unfolding of the masterpiece God longs to create in us and through us, He promises us a song, a song of praise, a song that will echo all He has done.  There is nodejection in that.
                                                                                          – Bev

(Related Bible reading: 1 Corinthians 12:6; 1 Corinthians 15:10; Ephesians 2:10; Psalm 40:1-3)