Contemplating Perfection

After five tedious months, Asherel has completed her entry for the NRA Wildlife Youth Art Contest. She has spent 5-7 hours a day on it for the past two months, while I have read her school work to her. She spent several hours a day during the three months prior to that. It has really been a monumental effort. She knows that the judges will not care that she devoted 1/28th of her entire life on earth to this wolf, however, and she will be judged on the merit of the final outcome. And of course, that judgment is subjective, and may not go the way we hope it would. For now, she is just relieved to have finished it.

Now after all this time, the last thing she must do is name it. After five hard months of effort on a piece of art, it deserves a stupendous name.
I matted it for her and then held it up in all its finished splendor.
"What will be the title?" I asked, filled with expectant wonder.
"How about Wolf Standing on Rock?" she said.
I lowered the painting, "Can you think of something more poetic?"
"Wolf Standing on A Rock?"
"Let's just go all out and call it The Wolf Standing on A Rock."
Or maybe even The Wolf Standing on A Rock with Grass in the Background.

She was tired. The wolf was supposed to be done a month ago, we thought. And each night she told me it would be done the next day. But the level of detail was excruciating, and she refused to lower her standards so the wolf genesis crept along more slowly that the gestational period of real wolves.  I suppose there is no name that would give proper justice to how much struggle, time, effort, despair, and delight went into the wolf. I came out this morning and stood a long time looking at the picture. Maybe obvious is the best choice after all. What does one title a picture grasping so ardently for perfection?

When Ezekiel goes before the people of Israel to confront them with their sin, how short they fall from the righteousness of God, he uses the Temple as a goad to their conscience. He tells them to look upon the beautiful temple of God, designed in exact conformation to God's plan. He tells them to consider all its exits, and entrances, and the laws contained within. It was constructed exactly as God required, and it was described by Ezekiel as Perfection.  There are only 7 times the word Perfection is used in the Bible, and most are from Ezekiel. In every case, however, except the Perfection of the temple, the word was used in paragraphs that showed how perfection on earth was always temporal, always limited, always vanished in the end. There would be no lasting perfection made by man. However, the seventh time the word perfection is used is in the book of Hebrews. The author of Hebrews tells us if perfection could have been achieved by the old order of human striving and sacrifice in repentance when they fell short, then there would have been no need for Jesus. But humankind always would fall short, would never reach perfection, not on their own.

I stood in front of the wolf picture, marveling at my daughter's use of form, light and dark, design, color and especially the incredibly detailed rendering of every hair on the wolf in a very difficult medium. He has a pensive look on his face, as he stands atop a rock, looking out over the beauty of God's creation. How about Contemplating Perfection for a name?

Psalm 119: 96
⁹⁶ To all perfection I see a limit,
   but your commands are boundless.

Tenuous Perches

"What are you going to write about with that picture?" asked Asherel.
"I don't know," I admitted, "I sometimes paint myself into a corner."

It is a strategy I often employ to jump-start creativity. It helps to overcome the "blank canvas" syndrome, or in the writing world, "writer's block." Not that I have either of those right now, but at times I do. However, I think the reason this malady is fairly rare with me is because I am very in tune with my subconscious and when my conscious creative juices run dry, I just tap into the wacky world of the id.  What invariably happens is I draw a picture with no conscious understanding of why I drew it, but when I look at it, I have a revelation. This is one of the ways I hear God. I don't hear him audibly, in case this entire paragraph has my friends dialing mental health services, but I hear Him as I reach deep into the areas of my murky thoughts and pull out a plum.
(See, that was an example.... I had never really thought, till my fingers typed the word "plum" that little Jack Horner was on my mind at all, or that the poem might really be about someone trying to recognize who He is in God's eyes when he has embraced Christ. It is quite obvious to me now, but I will not go into that as I don't think the message of Little Jack Horner eating his Christmas pie is the direction God is guiding me this morning. But I will say that Wikipedia says Jack Horner is the symbol of an opportunistic hypocrite.)

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled blog. So I was drawing on my iPod while Asherel was strumming with her guitar teacher, and out of my hand, seemingly on its own, a snowy scene with a snowy white wolf and a snow owl emerged.  The tree the poor owl is sitting on is bleakly naked and bending against the extreme slope of the mountainside it clings to. Its roots might just be barely holding on. The snow wolf is poised to catch any snowy owl that might fall should the tree lose its grip. What the wolf forgets, and maybe even the cold owl himself, is that the owl can fly, and if the tree falls down, the owl will stretch his wings and soar off with the snowflakes.
And now the meaning is totally apparent to me, and I even know why I thought of Jack Horner pulling out a plum, incorrect as my interpretation of the poem might be.

I think sometimes we are all feeling like the snowy owl in my picture, huddled against the snow. The world around us is slowly toppling, and hungry wolves prowl ready to devour us. It is cold and bleak and dark. Sometimes, we forget we have been given the means to escape. We forget we are free to soar on wings created by a loving Father.  Like Little Jack Horner, we had the plum in our pie the whole time, but we are always surprised when at just the right moment we reach in and pull out just the very thing we needed to remind us God is there, and in our despair He loves us still.

"I do paint myself into a corner," I continued explaining to Asherel, "But almost always, God shows me a way out. I rarely know what I am going to write, but for almost a year now, God has sent me a message every morning. I can't wait to see what He will do with the owl and the wolf."

Psalm 55:5-7

⁵ Fear and trembling have beset me;
   horror has overwhelmed me.
⁶ I said, “Oh, that I had the wings of a dove!
   I would fly away and be at rest.
⁷ I would flee far away
   and stay in the desert

Isaiah 40:31

³¹ but those who hope in the LORD
   will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
   they will run and not grow weary,
   they will walk and not be faint.