Once upon a time in Oklahoma we had a neighbor with a strange hobby. She would record this super-boring painting show on her old VCR and then she would follow along, pausing and rewinding and pausing some more, trying to paint the picture that the guy on TV was painting.
As a little kid, it was the most excruciatingly boring thing I had ever seen in my life. It was literally like watching paint dry, and then rewinding and watching the same paint dry again.
To say the least, I did not get that.
The painting show was called “The Joy of Painting,” and it was hosted by an extremely puffy-haired and soft-spoken guy named Bob Ross. Every episode began with Bob standing in front of a blank canvas. Then he would talk and tell stories and paint up some “happy trees” as he called them. By the end of the show he would have created a beautiful nature scene, and the whole time he would talk and smile and tell you that you could do it too.
Fast forward thirty years or so to today and I have a bit of an awkward confession… Today, I love that show.
It's on Amazon Prime. I turn it on sometimes and just sit back and soak it up. It's like art therapy. It is calm, creative, and cool. At the end of an episode I almost actually believe that if I would just head off to Hobby Lobby and get some supplies, then with a fan brush and a little bit of Phthalo Blue I could paint anything I wanted to.
In every episode there is this moment in which the canvas on which Bob Ross is painting transforms as I watch from a project to a painting.
Up to that point, it’s just paint on a canvas. After that point, it's just finishing touches. But in that moment, it is as if the painting happens. I love that moment because it is so real. And yet, that moment is an illusion. That painting has been happening since the first brush stroke. In a sense, the painting was happening even before that, with every brush stroke that Bob Ross ever made and with every experience that ever made him. Yet, in that moment, it's like I see the painting happen.
I’m telling you all of that today because I want to tell you something about you. Right now, in this moment, you are happening.
Maybe your life feels like a classic renaissance painting, like the Mona Lisa, with traditional lines and everything in perfect perspective. Maybe your life is like one of those Salvador Dali paintings where everything is so bent up and out of place that its dysfunction is what makes it beautiful. Maybe your life is so abstract that even if the whole world looks at it almost no one will ever get it, but that's part of what makes it so awesome.
In addition to whatever style of art you seem to be, you are also in some stage of the happening. Maybe you feel like a blank canvas that is just starting to be filled in, far from the moment in which you feel like you’ve really become anything yet. Maybe you feel like you're pretty much finished except for a stroke or two. Whatever style you think you are or stage you think you are in, the undoubtable fact is that you are happening.
And like every work of art, there is an artist at work in the making of you.
We call him God, and for whatever else that you are or wish you were (or weren’t), you are a unique masterpiece of His that is a part of the greatest collection of art that the universe will ever know.
But unlike Bob Ross’ canvases, you are neither blank nor passive.
You come into life pre-painted to some degree, and you have the ability in life to participate in your own making. On the down side, you have the ability to destroy yourself. In many ways, you already have. Yet God, this Master Artist of the Universe, is not done. He has the ability to make all things new, and He sent His Son Jesus into the world to clear our canvases of every imperfection. Right now in this moment you are still happening because the Artist is still working.
Cooperate with the Master Artist in the making of you. You are too important to be left to inferior hands, even your own.