This week at His Kingdom Come the verse is about loving yourself. We are supposed to love our neighbor as ourselves, so how do we love ourselves?
Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away;
behold, new things have come. ~ 2 Cor 2:17
But how do I draw out this new creation? How do I participate in uncovering me? Years ago I took a class called Equipping Caregivers. The first trimester the focus was on learning about yourself so that you could get out of the way of the Holy Spirit working through you to encourage and love the person in front of you. I learned a bit about my weaknesses and the areas of particular temptation. Lately, I have been reading about specific spiritual disciplines that stretch and nurture my personality type. I decided to spend the week loving myself by encouraging myself to stretch and grow.
One of my nurturing disciplines is to worship through creativity (surprise!). I have been wanting to explore the Scriptural Stations of the Cross more deeply and took advantage of this week to do so. The first station is Jesus Prays in the Garden of Gethsemane. My plan is to create a piece that, when hung at eye level, will pile onto the floor, and is wide enough that the viewer can imagine participating in the scene.
I love Christ's prayer recorded in John chapter 17 because He is praying for unity of all believers. Unity is what I have actively prayed for the past 15 years. It is a deep heart desire. I know I need to include the words of the prayer in the air around the central figure.
I found this hymn and have been playing it over and over this week. These are Christ's words to his disciples: Stay with me, wait with me, watch and pray.
In the Garden in Genesis, God walks with Adam. And when Adam sins, God goes to him. He calls to him, "Where have you gone?" In the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ asks his friends to walk with Him, to keep Him company. God desires our companionship. Singing this hymn all week has torn at my heart. God desires my companionship. He wants me to stay with Him and that is my deepest desire as well.
It is this moment in the Garden, when He asks his friends to stay with Him and they fall asleep, that has always made me sad. We just don't get it. We can't see what's coming. We don't understand him. We don't--we can't--understand what's at stake. It feels so very lonely. His Father has already started to withdraw Himself from His Son...and yet, he sends a sacred presence to comfort Him. I want to show that Presence as wind. My friend Valerie is smiling right now because she knows that wind is hard for me to depict. I can show some movement of his hair, perhaps some movement in the grass; but, what I really want is to create leaves that rustle. I tried several different materials, and I am not sure I've made a decision, but I like these leaves:
They are cut from fabric, soaked in GAC-400, and dried. I left them on the rim of a coated paper plate as they dried so they would have some shape. I tried embossing the leaves on the left with copper embossing powder and I don't think I like those as well as the plain ones.
Here are my crispy leaves on the fabric I've chosen for "dusk." I will build a palette around this gray-blue to depict early evening.
This is a long project, but I'm not in a hurry. Immersing myself in this study is nurturing to me. When I come up for air, I feel healthier, filled up, better equipped to love.