Shield

But You, O LORD, are a shield about me,
My glory, and the One who lifts my head. 

Perils, shouts of despair and hopelessness, shame, enemies, failures, temptations, fears, regrets, trials.  Not all the time and not all at once, but these are common struggles for us all.  One of the surest places in prayer I ever come to is the declaration that God is my shield, He lifts my head and He stands between me and my enemies. 

Ultimately, it is in Christ that we see this expressed, He bore our sorrows and the shame for our sins before His Father so that we might have access to pray and find acceptance with a holy God. 

Psalms 3, 84, 91

Every Tear

You have taken account of my wanderings;
Put my tears in Your bottle
Are they not in Your book? 

Every tear is kept and marked down.  Not a trial or tribulation is missed. 

I think it is easy to miss that God’s omniscience is not a divine expression of scrapbooking.  We aren’t comforted by the fact that God is all knowing or compulsive enough to keep track of everything, but that He thinks fondly enough of us to take note of our every trial and every tear.  It is great reminder that we can confidently draw near to Him, casting our burdens and anxieties on Him because He truly does care for us, on intimate level.

Psalm 56:8

Everything

Let everything that has breath praise the LORD.
Praise the LORD! 

Psalms are songs, no doubt, and most if not all, were put to music, but they are also instruction.  They call us to praise God in all aspects of our lives, sadness, anger, joy, triumph, lament, dedication.  But we aren’t all musicians that get to play in the great assembly of saints, and so Psalms ends with the instruction that everything that has breath is to praise God. Everything.

Psalm 150

I am exciting to be taking part in this group installation.  There is always a gap between what I visualize a project to look like and how it comes out, but this is even more exciting because it is such a grand scale, other artists with great visions and talents, and hearing their ideas but waiting to see it take shape and come together and how they interact.  The gallery space is being prepped and it looks awesome.  It has it’s own look and I am already amazed.

Below is an image developed for a stencil I made for one of my contributions, excited again to see how things come together and to move away from how I have done things before, open up for input while a project is in process and just have a great time laughing and working and moving pianos and hanging ropes and drawing with ash.  And that was just day one for me! 

 Thought I should write a quick update, been busy with work that isn’t really something I can post here yet.  Working on some pieces that are part of an installation that is a reflection on the book of Psalms. 

Looking forwrad to a few things about this including, working as a group with fellow art folks from my church, seeing the installation come together, seeing how different ideas take shape, including my own.

On that note, it was exciting today to push through some obstacles and normal ways I work.  I usually work in a very literal vein, what I can only think of as “being a purist.”  So if I need arrows, as I do for my project for the upcoming installation, my mind goes to how to produce arrows of a historic sort, complete with hand made fletchings from real feathers and arrow heads knapped from flint…not capable of actual flight but approximating a look I feel is aunthentic.

But faced with both time and money constraints and yet wanting to be productive today and not push the project off til later (no time for that really), I looked through materials I did have and came up with a totally different look made from National Geographic pictures of Terns (a sea bird of sorts) and Canada Geese for flecthings and playing cards cut into arrow heads.

I know, sounds crazy, but I like the look and it works for me on several layers, but what is really exciting for me was getting away from a literal representation and using materials creatively.

This post serves as a marker to myself mostly to remember this development and continue to explore that.  But if you have been reading then thought you might care to know what has been going on.

The above image was originally going to be for my review of my time at Calvin Institute (in Grand Rapids MI, near Holland) and the symposium on worship, but I am feeling like that may not happen and I like the Dutch Chuck piece (get the Holland reference now?).  So there it is.

At first I was disappointed about the outdoor installation for the current exhibit, Going Home, but I got over it quickly as this is an amazing work, featuring over 10,000 hand cut butterflies designed with Day of the Dead colors and images.  The monarch butterflies these paper ones portray migrate between the US and Mexico and so it was a fitting image for remembering the 14 Mexican immigrants, the “Yuma 14,” who died crossing the Arizona desert. 

The full description and story of Going Home is here. 

I had to go back today to get pictures that would at least attempt to do this installation some justice.  Hope you get a chance to go downto 7th and Main to catch a glance.