I painted this last year after one of the guys in my college Christian Union group, mentioned at our weekly prayer breakfast that he'd had this image of someone holding an upside-down umbrella, on his mind and he couldn't shake it off, so he thought he'd share it. None of us were sure of what it meant, or if it had any meaning at all, but the image played on my mind as well, and I decided I might draw it!
Since then I had obviously been thinking about it quite a bit. And when I looked at it, I saw someone who was unnecessarily burdening herself; carrying the weight of all that water when she could simply hold the umbrella the other way round and feel just the gentle pulsing as the drops hit and the water slid down the sides, as it was intended. I also painted her in wellington boots; so she could even be running around playing in the rain, who knows?! It struck me that I often get bogged down trying to work out the "specifics" - what more I should be doing, what I'm failing to do, where I should be heading. All important questions, but piling them as weight upon weight on my own head, when God says, "Just LOVE me! And watch everything else fall into place, as it was intended." Like a sermon I heard a while ago which talked about striving for holiness not being about being "better" or "more good". Holiness is about the very essence of God - it is what makes God, well, GOD! Striving for holiness is about striving to be closer to him in all that we do and are! The "being better" comes out of that! Another, more recent sermon talked (on Romans 6.11) about the task we, as Christians, have before us; it's not to spend our lives cowering, afraid that we might sin, but to live, ALIVE IN GOD. Sin cannot live where God is. For God is light; the light that the darkness of sin can NEVER overcome! To splash in the puddles of God's Living Water that he - in his mighty grace - rains down on us! I also showed this picture to some friends and family of mine, and just talked to them about my thinking on it. My mum said that what she saw in it was someone who, though they had no idea how to use what they had, they were still managing to make it work. I guess that's true of our relationship with God as well; I know that when I feel God leading me down a new path, I often have no clue how I will do it with what I've got around me - my gifts, my relationships, my material resources! But God doesn't leave us stranded and often he shows us a new way of bringing him into the lives of those around us. At my church prayer group earlier in the week, we were looking at Mark 6.45-52, where Jesus walks on water. We were confounded by a line I'd never really noticed before: that Jesus "wished to pass them by"! According to Mark, Jesus' plan had been to simply cross the lake. But when he saw the disciples' fear and their inability to row against the wind, he went to them, climbed into the boat and the wind ceased. Perhaps we don't always get quite as vivid an entrance into our lives as this, nor, often, the complete ceasing of the storms. But perhaps we do find ourselves in situations we could never have imagined, being shown - and showing - God's love in ways we never thought we could! A friend from church also shared what they saw in it; they saw someone who had purposefully gone out to collect the water. She'd put on her wellies, and she'd taken what she had and she was collecting the rain. To me this depicts how we receive from God in worship of him. When we take whatever we have, and we hold it up to God and he rains down upon us. And the life and grace and love he rains down is just as precious as water; just as life-giving. A couple of years back, in the Dominican Republic, there were massive water shortages due to a lack of rain and limited clean water supplies in the poorer communities, and I realised how precious and how taken-for-granted our tap water is here. But Jesus said he will give water to "all who are thirsty," and they shall "never thirst again". How needed is the life that God brings! If only we remembered how precious it is, and how taken-for-granted we sometimes make it; if only we could collect it, and bring it back, and share it out... What do you see in this image? What does it mean to you? Feel free to share below! :-)
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AuthorI'm a recent Cambridge Theology graduate now studying for a Masters in Biblical Studies and blogging about all sorts of things! I'm interested in faith, Church, theology, social action, the great outdoors and being creative, and all of those things - along with many more - come through in my posts!
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April 2020
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