what I learned today

Tonight at the artists small group we talked about the importance of practicing spiritual disciplines. Creatives perhaps even more than some need to be disciplined enough to slow down in order to even be creative! We talked about how difficult it is to say 'no' and stick to it.

Perhaps our favorite quote was this "inspiration is strained when hurried...this is because inspiration is a dialogue, and we must hear before we create." We must hear from our God! The other thing we all agreed on is the fact that the true artist is a worshiper! We then learned what the attributes of God were - focusing silently on this list for a few moments...this evoked worship!


After discussing the attributes of God , we each chose one as the focus of our "automatic drawing" exercise. We approached the paper in a 'fencing' stance - fully extending our arm to just touch the paper. Oh yeah, did I mention we used our left hand or whichever hand was our non-dominate hand? One of the artists informed us this would cause us to create new brain cells since we were not using our usual hand. (If that's all it takes to create new brain cells I think I just became left-handed!) We painted 5 minutes, then stepped away from the paper and looked at our painting then began again drawing inspiration from the attributes of our God. It was very challenging to not do 'good' paintings for the artists since they are each so talented, but, automatic drawing challenged us to respond to the Lord without trying to create anything specific. So fun! I enjoyed the night immensely drawing encouragement from being surrounded by artists who love the Lord!

my day off

I was just sitting here thinking back over the opportunities that God has given me this past week.

Here are just a few pictures of our team at work!

I would have to say one of my very favorites was volunteering at the Art Around the Block event. Our Artist small group went downtown Mansfield to volunteer and help kids paint and tie die! I love hanging out with artists and watching creativity happen!

The guys here are Art and Bob from our group with a great photographer Otto Schmidt who just so happened to take my wedding pictures. Kim Quick on the right has her own pottery shop and also attends our group!

We are praying that our small group's presence at the Art Center and serving them at events will open the doors to showing them God's love.

my day off

We got art display boards up for the Artist Small Group's art show this weekend, so the art goes up tomorrow...exciting! After getting that done we headed back home to grill out and relax around our deck - perfect summer evening.

I feel right now like I have so much to do that it is difficult to begin, so I am reading instead! ha ha - not the greatest solution I guess. But, what I am reading is amazing, once again it is about stillness and silence. It says that "all fruitfulness and maturity will grow from time we spend with God. Besides, the things we do could easily be done by many others. We are not indispensable to the work of God. We sometimes get an exaggerated sense of the importance of what we do."

Puts it in perspective doesn't it? I'll work tomorrow!