A new painting

First of all, I have had a whirlwind day. I walked as the sun was coming up, ran home to get kids off to school, left to have blood work done and an x-ray on my shoulder. I got out just in time to make it back to my neighborhood for my yoga class. I got out of that and ran straight to a meeting. I had to end that early to go get Max from school since they have early release every Wednesday. Now, it's time to go get Sam. Maybe I can stay put after that!

In Bible Study these past several weeks, we've been focusing on the passage in Mark telling the story of the woman touching the hem of Jesus' robe and being healed. This woman had suffered bleeding for 12 years! We've done various meditation exercises with this passage, asked some probing questions, and done a lot of journaling. I led the women in the process of non-dominant hand face drawings and painting. I have a larger class this year than i did last with most of them having no art background. So, much of my classroom time was spent doing demonstrations over and over, showing techniques a number of times, and helping those that needed help. To do my demos, I literally just grabbed a page and marker and just quickly drew out a sorta' wonky face. These types of pieces are not meant to be life like. Anyway, I had a couple of pieces in different stages of progress and have been using them to demonstrate different things. So, yesterday was our last day spent on this passage and project. By this point, all of the women were working pretty independently to finish their pieces before we all gathered to share what this process has been like and what they have learned about God or themselves. I decided to sit down and finish up one of the paintings. It was so calming to have a paint brush in my hands, I can't even tell you. As I was painting, my heart was heavy as I was mulling over a lot of painful things going on in my life right now. Suddenly, I noticed the page I had drawn the face on and could read the words through her face. The words "comfort me" jumped out like a flashing red sign. Indeed, this has been my hearts cry to God. Here I thought this piece was just something I was emotionally detached from and just wanted to finish my sample/instructional piece. However, I should know by now that intuitive work never turns out to be "just nothing". There's always a personal message in it. I found it very touching that God revealed this to me while I was painting when I felt so detached. And here she is: