Add Another Piece to Your Collection
My mind raced as three pairs of eager eyes stared up at me. I’d promised my children a new story, but my brain scrambled to come up with the details. While I stalled, inwardly a host of questions knocked. I wanted to teach them about forgiveness, sacrifice, kindness, patience, friendship, strength, courage, and the list went on and on. I wanted it to be good—a story that would stick with them, move them, and guide them as they grew. All my hopes flooded into my brain as I tried to form characters and a plot to wow the faces before me.
Except I knew I couldn’t. I knew the story I would tell couldn’t live up to all I hoped it could be.
Desires like these traipse alongside us in many avenues of our labor. Whether it's work or play, we might find ourselves sitting before a blank screen, a ball of yarn, or a mixing bowl hoping to do our best. The turn of the New Year pulls up similar feelings of hope and guilt as we dream about the possibilities ahead. Maybe we’ll finally crochet the show-stopping afghan we’ve been dreaming of. Perhaps the gripping novel we’ve always wanted to create will finally be a masterpiece. The painting that’s been dancing around in our minds will become a tangible reality. The new project at work will be completed and prove our skills and passions.
The trouble is, as we approach a new start with all our hopes and dreams, we remember the past and the projects that didn’t turn out as perfectly as we planned. We think of the painting, the poem, or the article that couldn’t quite express everything we wanted but, instead, left us yearning ahead—for another chance to create, express, and labor in our work.
While the limits within our creative work might lead us to despair, we need not let it. This year we can choose to see the gift God gives us in allowing another year of labor to add to our collection.
Don’t Judge an Artist
Last year I found myself immersed in a building of masterpieces. My family and I visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and I relished every step through the ornate rooms covered with the labor of hundreds of artists. What struck me, along with the beauty, was the variety. I walked through the gallery of Henri Matisse and took in the strong abstract shapes on the canvases. A few feet later, I was arrested by Henri’s depiction of a woman in the midst of a forest trail. Though his style was recognizable, the natural colors and tone felt so different from the works surrounding it. While I stared at the image, I wondered what Matisse wanted to communicate specifically with this work.
This little anecdote belies an important truth that Francis Schaeffer articulated well: “No artist can say everything he might want to say or build everything he might want to build into a single work” (Art and the Bible, 62). We’ll find this truth displayed in every artist, whether they are a painter, sculptor, or a writer. The works of Rembrandt must be taken together if we’re to get a full idea of all he hoped to convey. Likewise, we can’t judge E.B. White on Charlotte’s Web alone but instead must read the whole of his work to see his themes of love and friendship expressed in subtly different ways.
This reality echoes throughout the very Scripture sitting on our nightstand. The incredible drama of God’s salvation wasn’t condensed into a single message. While God foretold Christ’s salvation in Genesis 3:15, he spent the next thousands of years patiently revealing himself and his redemptive plan to his church. In his goodness, he patiently added layer after layer in order for his people to slowly learn and see the fullness of his glory.
This idea stands starkly against the trend of our culture in which you and I can be defined by or expected to fully express ourselves through an Instagram profile or Facebook picture. Our lives—and, in turn, our work and creativity—involve so much more than that. God designed our creativity and work to stretch out for the whole of our days, giving us time to share in the fullness of his beauty and goodness.
How Then Shall We Work
If we approach our creative labors with this kind of long-view perspective, it will enable us to create more freely. Instead of worrying over perfection, we’ll be freed to work toward excellence with our present skills. These skills will always be changing anyway. While God doesn’t change, he created human beings who do. We change every day in our own sanctification as we move from one degree of glory to another by the renewal of the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18; 4:16). Yet we also grow in other ways—in our knowledge, skills, and abilities. The story we write today will most likely pale in comparison to the one we write in ten years. The website we design right now will surely look different than the one we create even six months from now. A long-view perspective acknowledges this reality and sees it as a gift. The Lord has graciously enabled us to add another piece more beautiful than the last to our collection of labor.
A long-view perspective also helps us work with patience. When we understand the finish line isn’t simply the next deadline but the end of our life, we’ll approach our work differently. We’ve got time—time to try, grow, and even to have fun. I might not be able to convey everything I want to my kids in one story, but I can patiently pour into them through a dozen different stories spread throughout the years. The last article, painting, or novel you wrote may not have received the likes, shares, and notoriety you expected, but we can patiently remember that the temporal isn’t all we’re after. We’re not laboring for one moment, but for a lifetime.
Francis Schaeffer summed it up well saying, “Each man has the gift of creativity in terms of the way he lives his life. In this sense, the Christian’s life is to be an art work. The Christian’s life is to be a thing of beauty in the midst of a lost and despairing world” (Art and the Bible, 62.)
Each of us spends our days creating art, no matter if we love to paint or not. The patient toil we spend at work, home, and in a simple hobby places one more piece of beauty into the world around us. This is what we were made for. The sum of these offerings displays the beauty of our God and fulfills his call to proclaim his glory throughout the world. We won’t see it all through one, but only when we stand back to appreciate the whole.
As we look ahead at our future goals and projects, let’s look with a renewed perspective. Let’s throw off the pressure for perfection and, instead, add another canvas to a beautiful collection.
Brianna Lambert is a wife and a mom to three, making their home in the cornfields of Indiana. She loves using writing to work out the truths God is teaching her each day. She is a staff writer with GCD and has contributed to various online publications, such as Christianity Today and The Gospel Coalition. You can find more of her writing at BriannaLambert.com.