Strength

Invariably, I tell my relatively new art students to bring a "simple" picture to sketch from and they show up with a picture of a forest. Since the focus of my class is not creativity, but exact drawing skill, we are now faced with trying to replicate all the sinews and tendons of a tree. This is almost as exacting as my college art class where I spent a semester drawing a stalk of broccoli. That professor was clearly out of his mind, and I suspect long ago in some sort of institution other than higher education.

So here is a free art lesson. Everyone grab paper and pencil- I'll wait. I tell the student first find the main part of the tree, the trunk, and draw that as exactly as you can. Most trunks are straight, though of course not all are, and start thickest at the base and grow narrower as they rise. I find that many young students consistently draw their trunks growing fatter as they rise.
One of my jobs is to help the student figure out what part of the drawing is "off".

"What will happen to your tree in the first breeze?" I ask, pointing to the skinny bottom and top heavy upper limit of the trunk.

And then, I have them draw only the 3 or 4 main limbs coming off the trunk. Again, those they are to draw as exactly as they can, following the sinuous and often shockingly beautiful curves.
And again, they often begin their life as a tree artist drawing the point where the limbs connect to the trunk skinny, getting fatter as they reach to their outer edges.

"What will happen to this limb when the first squirrel scampers on this branch?"

My young artists' trunks and branches will be snapping off right and left, crashing right off the page, smooshing innocent squirrels in a haze of pencil dust. They see it when I point it out, but strangely, most don't notice this incongruity until I do.

For various reasons, I have been thinking lately a good bit about the source of strength. I believe that the ultimate source of strength is God, He is the root of the tree of my life. But I also believe that like a tree, He has provided branches of strengthening influences that have varying effects depending on the distance from the trunk. I guess in my analogy, I am a branch, needing to stay connected to the trunk, but still reaching out to a life that will extend to a world filled with strong winds and fat squirrels. If my connection point is weak, I won't be a part of the tree much longer. I think one of the critical branches is the family, and the connection to family is one that is weakened only at our peril. I have reached the age where all the little twigs in my family are anxious to reach out even further and further to the endless sky of possibilities and I totally understand the need. I just hope they never feel that the twig can or should exist without the rest of the tree.

¹ A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. ² The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him—
the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and of power,
the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD Isaiah 11:1-3