I’ve been playing around with some new art. I posted this on my instagram today and thought I’d put it on here as well. God is really touching my life right now, and I am so thankful. I feel like I’m being reborn.
Enjoy this art!
At the top of 2020 I had found myself out in the middle of nowhere. More humble people would just say, “I got lost.” In this time I began to take a good and honest look at who I was on the inside, as I began to realize that I wasn’t very proud of the life I’d chosen to live in. God felt far. And I also felt very far from myself. I began a new journey inwards. I began to lay bare my addictions, anxieties, and ways I was avoiding my own pains and insecurities. As I sifted through my gunk, terrified of the things I was discovering and admitting, I heard a constant invitation to a new start. It came in the form of this question, “Is there more out there?”
I feel like God gifted me this image to give me hope and to illuminate my situation. And here is the metaphor explained: Throughout the course of our lives, we might find ourselves making homes in places that were never meant to be our homes. These are our islands. The island represents the many addictions and false realities we adopt to cope with our pain. We find ourselves stranded, afraid, and desperate. As time passes, this darkness becomes our new normal. We grow weary, tired of fighting, and begin to make our home in these places of addiction, medication, and avoidance, eventually losing our ability to imagine a life beyond what we can immediately see. We settle into our islands. We were castaways who become citizens.
This painting is a self portrait, depicting me in this tiny rowboat paddling my way away from my island, barely escaping its tides and gravity. The open ocean behind me is vast and terrifying, but I know I had to leave that place or I would die there. And this encapsulates one of the most beautiful invitations of life to me: that there is an opportunity to change, always. We always have a choice, it’s just that the cost of change is all of you. The question then becomes: will you get in the boat, leave everything that is both familiar and hindering, paddle as if your life depended on it, and never look back?