...sir atheist, esquire

I have a marvelous atheist friend who I owe more than most to my logical journey with Christ.  His facebook posts are never against any other religion claiming to believe in a god.  Only Christianity...

This seems illogical.  

Why do atheists spend such inordinate amounts of time thinking about God if, indeed, he doesn't exist?  This also seems illogical to me.

It doesn't bother me.  It's just a curiosity I find illogical.

But this particular blog entry is about me processing a particular facebook post.

Sir Atheist has caused me to look repeatedly and honestly at what I believe.  I'm so very grateful!

The post I'm currently processing was a slam about someone who Sir Atheist said claims to be a "real Christian" (his quotes, not mine) who has political views he disagrees with.  (I didn't read the article, but I might disagree too.  The politics are not the point of my reasoning.

The point is that the term "real Christian" had some preconceived definition for my friend.  Since my friend didn't define what he thought a real Christian should look like,  I decided to ask myself.

"So what is a 'real Christian?'"  I mean REALLY?

To begin with, the assumption from so many of Sir Atheist's comments infer that he is fed up with self-righteousness, sham, imperfection...  The particular part of the South where he and I were raised breeds the expectation that a "good Christian" behaves a certain way... and that is "perfectly".  At least it held that expectation for me.

But here goes my thought process:

-To be a real Christian infers that there is a real Christ.

-If this Christ was historically real and actually who he claimed to be, then He was a Savior.

-By definition, to be a Savior infers that there is a situation/circumstance/condition from which a person needs to be saved.

-If Christ followers, then, are following a Savior, then to be a "real Christian" is by definition an admission of imperfection - of sham - of junk.

-Also, if Jesus Christ is who he said he was, he comes to save us because we need him, not because we're good enough to have him.

-If God sent a Savior seeing that we were, in fact, in need of one, then for me as a Christian to expect myself to be perfect by my own efforts/behavior is illogical and foolish.  I simply trade one trap for another and lose all touch with the AMAZING GRACE that the slave trader who wrote that hymn humbly saw with blinding thankfulness -  that, at our worst, Christ gave his best.

(Side thought:  Logically, I suppose there might be some hypocritical atheists as well.  LOL.  Wonder what that looks like.)

-To assume that Christians are all mature people is illogical.  They are just people.

-To assume that the definition of a Christian is "people trying to love God" is illogical.

               If I read my Bible, I come face to face with just the opposite.

-The definition of a Christian, according to what I read in my Bible,  is God loving people who are shallow, biased, haters, critical, proud, selfish, misinformed, immature - imperfect.  Christian doesn't think she's better than anyone else.  She's ecstatic that she is so loved, so accepted, so valued that the God who exists makes it possible for her to know him IF she comes to the cross not pretending to have any bargaining chips.

-To be forgiven and loved and welcomed at my worst causes me to dance in Grace!  It's the only logical conclusion to such generosity!


Yes, I'm embarrassed by what people do in the name of Christ!  But that does not negate what Christ himself did for me on the cross... by not staying there.

So, Sir Atheist, Esquire.  I love you more daily!  Thanks for being honest.  It would seem the Lord can use even a devout atheist to draw me closer to his amazing grace.  I'm more thankful for you in my life than I could possibly tell you.

With love and thanks,

your old friend, Lydia

ain't nothin easy...

Sheesh.  Thought I'd be so efficient and blog this morning.

My daughter's google account seems to have kidnapped my blog.  Weird.  Rich fixed it on this computer, while the laptop was fine.  But now the laptop, which WAS fine, is doing what the this one did.  But now, I've uploaded the photos on the laptop, dropbox is playing hOudini, and why would the laptop ask for Rich's google ID for iphoto?

Do you get it?  Me neither!

--------------------OK.  That was yesterday.  This is today.-------------

I watched an AMAZING video while exercising this morning.  Michael Jr. - How Comedy Works.

It was more than a good laugh... and I highly recommended laughing while doing knee lifts.  That was funny in itself.

He talks about giving, but I won't give away his punchline.  Just go to youtube and type in that title.  You don't have to exercise, just watch it!  :)

At any rate, he inspired me not to give up.  So...I decided not to give up and try this again.

I have a plan of sorts:  Work on the suede skirt.  See, I'm not God.  His plans are perfect.  Mine are just experiments.  So don't look for perfect parallels here, OK?  I can't handle that kind of pressure.

I'm just me.   

I found myself last session forgetting the lessons my first and best art teacher, Jeannie Maddox, taught us.  For out first painting, she only allowed us to use primary colors and white - no black or premixed colors.  She taught us to see the depth of color even in shadows.  So, while I used some yellow ocre, I also squirted out my greens, reds and blues and yellows today... eventually.

The edges are messy, but that's totally not a problem.

 When I used just my browns, I was focusing on texture.

Then, I began to add color, even the texture became highlighted.  

 I often paint the back ground first, to set the scene and help me with contrast.  But I knew I should wait until I was done with the texture and pouncing before I dropped "Camille" into her setting.

This morning, I'm thinking of how long I had to wait before God brought me here to my own green setting.  There was a lot of pouncing and character building that needed to be done in me first, or I would have caused others near me to be pounced just because they we close by.  (Ever been wounded by the emotional shrapnel of the bomb that went off in someone else's life?  Yeah.  Me too.)  If God had placed me here, before the pouncing, there would have been a lot of messiness that didn't belong in this setting.  I'm glad he waited.

Slowly, the skirt came into focus.

It's not done yet, but it IS a safe time for the background.

 And this is where the story comes in.  I finished this just before Rich came home.  I was painting under stress to get done, reach my goal, give him a "Tah Dah for today" view.  If you compare this to the earlier images, you'll see I had painted the skin tones of the neck and hand.  I didn't know how to handle this. By leaving the suggestion of skin, the portrait of the dress became a decapitated head.  Disturbing.  I plan to come back and leave a slight suggestion of the neck and hand, but first I had to paint out all but the outfit.

But here's the weird thing.  I painted over the skin tones, fixed dinner and then looked through our kitchen pass at the painting.

It's always a good idea to step away and get perspective.

What I saw was an accidental face where the face would be if I had chosen to paint one.  In the mottled background, much like a face in the clouds, was the face of a very sad girl.  Maybe this was a subconscious thing, because as I've been painting this, I've been praying for a girl in New York.

Are you familiar with a thing called intercessory prayer?  Sometimes God plants an image or a name in your imagination/mind to pray for.  I've been the recipient of people praying for me without having met me.  It was at a pivotal crisis time in my life.  Their prayers, and finding out about them, totally saved me from making a HUGE mistake.  That's a story for another day, but I began to pray for this girl.

(If she's only my imagination, then there's no harm done.  Maybe imagining her will provide the inspiration for the story within this garment.  But if she DOES exist and I DON'T pray, then she and I have both missed out on something precious and possibly life changing.)

Prayers aside, I was a little unnerved to see that haunting face.  Not at all what I wanted in that spot.  I wanted LIGHT filtering into the moment through beautiful early fall colors.

I had Rich come stand where I was.  I asked him if he saw a face above the dress.  He looked and said, "Whoa.  That's a little creepy.  It looks like a skull type head looking at her."  I said, "What?  I just see her looking down sadly.  See?"  Then I pointed out where she was.

But Rich didn't see that face till I showed him.  He'd been looking at the top left corner.  He showed me where he was looking.  It was creepy.  Naturally, I wanted to get rid of it.  So I immediately went and painted fresh new green over both areas starting with the darker, stronger greens to obliterate these rather disturbing images.  I let it dry and all I could see were other disturbing images with different features.

I wondered if maybe the sci-fi series I'd just watched - which was a bit dark toward the end - had filtered its way into my painting.  But, no matter why, it needed to be gone!

"Lord, what do I do?"

Use light.

So I went for straight white with a bit of yellow and made my first pass of several to come over the two areas.  It was the only thing that worked.

Later, at pillow talk, I said to Rich, "You know what I realized?  You can't get rid of darkness by adding more darkness.  It just changes form, but stays dark.  Only light gets rid of darkness."

The painting still needs more light.  It's a process.  But I know the answer.

I Thessalonians 5:5  For you are all children of light, children of the day.

©2015 Lydia D. Crouch

...before and afters

I Cor 11:1 Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ.


To me, this has always been a gutsy statement.  Am I following Christ enough to be able to say, "Hey, follow me and my example," and then know that I'll be leading someone toward Christ?

The older I get, the less qualified I feel.

But God...

God sees the unfinished me, and doesn't worry.  He loves "before and after" scenarios more than I do.

The corner "before"

The corner "after"

Any renovation or creation has ugly stages that are required to create an "after".

 When I paint, there are ugly stages. But that first blob of paint squirted on my palette is always so exciting.  It's like jumping off the high dive for the first swim of the summer. 

And this one (still in progress) is my first effort at a "flip off the board."  I've never done anything remotely like this.  I'm designing dresses, outfits, and painting them.  A portrait of a dress.  Weird, but I'm totally loving this!  Being set free in this thing that is totally me with God.  It's like bringing your first child home and thinking, "Oh, my word!  I love you so!  God, please help me not botch this!"

My friend, Lisa, dared me to blog the process - to let you come with me.  Yikes!!!  I typically hold my cards close until I can play a winning hand.  Actually, I don't even like to play cards, much less do I gamble so that's an absurd word picture for me to use for myself.  But you get the point, right?  LOL  But seriously, why would I let you in when I'm trying to paint bravely - try new things - learn to make mistakes so that I can learn?  It's gonna get ugly.    It may take a really long time.  You'll have to just be patient.

Why would I show you that?  Why take this dare? 

Honestly, I have no idea.  I'm just excited to try.  So here we go.

This will be a fall outfit.  I picture a girl walking in a park in New York City on one of those early Fall days around 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon when the sun starts to filter through the leaves just beginning to turn.

She's wearing a suede skirt and a tank with a sheer overlay blouse.  Soft boots.

So here we go:

I'm trying to create the texture of suede.  I have no idea how to do this.  The blobs on the right are experiments on a piece of canvas board.

In the meantime, I begin to block in colors.

What color do you think this outfit is?  Brown.   A bit of burgundy?  Actually, it's a watercolor wash of tranparent greens, yellows and fall toned blues.  I know you can't see that.  That's OK.  I can.

At this stage, much as I want to just keep painting, it's important to just leave it alone until this step dries.  (Sometimes, I feel left alone in a drab brown stage.  But God's not done with me yet.  He sees something.)

Then I start to mix.  And pounce.  Yes pounce.  If you were to watch, you'd think I was attacking the poor canvas, but that's how it works.  The brush is soft and the canvas is resilient.

Soon, the visual texture of suede appears.  But I want more this time.  I want real texture, not just the appearance of texture.

Now.  I feel like I'm failing at this point.  As I said, I don't know what I'm doing.  But I decided going in that I would make mistakes in order to learn.

How do I get texture?  Brush?  Not enough.  Glob on paint. Too glumpy for raw suede.

Sand?  It would have to be very fine.  Not anything I can grab from the driveway.  Salt?  It would melt.

So I decide to sacrifice some of my Gulf Coast white sand that I carefully treasure in a jar.  This sand is from the beach where God always talks to me.  He seems to take me there when I'm in the middle of crisis.  Long walks sooth me and there's always "a thin place",

as Robert Whitlow calls it, where the barrier between the heavenlies and me is not so impenetrable.

I grew up there, in so very many ways.  I'm always a child there, in so very many ways.

It's really an emotional moment to sacrifice some of my precious sand to an experiment - what might fail.  I take the canvas and lay it flat.  I paint over what I'd already done even though it was pretty, which is in itself a bit painful.  Did I fail?  No.  Not in the long haul.  I keep telling myself, "I'm just learning.  It's OK not to get it right the first time.  It's OK to paint over something pretty to get something better."

 I sprinkle sand on the wet paint and I work it in.  "Now, what?  Do I let it dry first or start working it?  If it fails, I guess I can just sand it off..."

As the paint mixes with the sand, it begins to make the texture I'm looking for.  See it at the top?

And I'm excited!  Lots of tears fell into that sand, and now it's becoming part of something joyful!

"Who in their right mind would throw sand on a beautiful white canvas?"  I can hear hear the critic...
Insecurities chat.  Memories flood in and threaten to make me feel like a failure.  "Who am I to think I can figure this out?  I'm not an artist.  I always quit before I really finish."

Let me tell you a story.

I was once painting my bedroom wall.  The bottom layer was a very intense blue, but very little of it would show once I was done.  A critic came in and said, "That blue is way too bold.  You won't like it."  I replied, "It's not finished."  I tried to explain that it was a lot like a cake.  If you tasted the eggs and flour before they were mixed with the sugar and baked, you'd say it wasn't any good.  She continued to tell me why the blue was wrong, even though it was chosen by me for my own bedroom.  It became comical... and frustrating.

And you know what?  She stumped me.  Even though I knew she was wrong, I let her opinion of the wall soak in as an opinion of me.  I should have just trusted my gut, but instead, it took me months to process that.  But God....   In the end, I was able to finish.  And I loved it.  After I finished my original vision with 3 layers and a wash over all, the same critic came in an said, "Oh this is a much better color than that blue you had the first time."  I said, "It's the same blue.  It's just finished."  She argued again.  "No it's not.  That blue was garish.  This is soft and airy."   I tried to tell her, "It's just what I said before.  You just couldn't see it because I hadn't added all the layers."  She refused to agree, even though I was the creator and knew every bit of what I had created.  Still, I was glad she liked my end result.  Perhaps her opinion mattered too much.  But she mattered to me and I was unable to separate them at the time.

Here's another story.

I was sketching a mural on the wall in an interior decorator's home.  She's AMAZINGLY GIFTED.  I asked her, "What's the hardest thing for you to do with your clients?"  She thought and then said, "Layers."  I smiled.  She continued.  "They come in when it's half done and say, 'That's too much green,' and I say, 'Just wait until the cushions are done and the curtains are up.  It will all make sense once all the layers are on.'  And when they see the final product, they're thrilled."

My friend left for a couple of hours in which time I had finished sketching and had begun to paint what would eventually be an English country pastel landscape.  She walked in to check on my progress.  She exclaimed, "It's black!!!"  I laughed and simply said, "Layers."  She busted out laughing and said, "I can't believe I even said that."

One last example.

When people came through the family room and saw my canvas at this point,

 lots of them said, "Oh, I love your pink dress!"

I'd give a mischievous grin and say, "It's actually white."  Then I'd explain what I had in mind.  Do I blame them for not seeing a white dress?  Of course not!

This dress took over a year of emotional processing.  For days, I'd just stare at.  So afraid to finish in case it should turn out horribly.  But finally, I just kept painting.

Trying things I've never done, like opalescent glaze.

Diving into the details and overcoming my fears.

God began to show me that much of what I don't like about what He's doing - when I feel ugly and left alone - is actually part of something beautiful.  What is underneath is crucial, and beautiful to Him, even if it seems opposite to what I dream of becoming.

Artists and dreamers know that there are ugly stages.  There could even be those who would argue the dress should stay pink.  If the pink stage was able to wake up a dream in the critic for them to hold on to, then YAY!  But this dress is my dream - and it was meant to be white.

The critics may disagree, but in the end it's my dream, and I get to choose.  As an artist, I'm learning that it's really OK for someone not to like what I do. 

If they look at this dress without knowing the self portrait story behind it, they can think what they will.  But they'll be off the mark.  It hurts all the same, but I have to let choose what they think.

If they walk in on me at the pink or brown stage, can I blame them for not being able to see a white dress or a sheer watercolor print blouse?  Of course, not!  Maybe they need a pink dress in their dreams.  If my work doesn't fit their dreams, I'll just have to learn to let that be.

But me?  I needed this particular white dress. 

So, I'll just smile - and keep painting - and think, "Layers."



©2015 Lydia D. Crouch

...whew!

I don't know what just happened, but between this post and the last one I got to remodel the family room with my husband and kids' full blessing.  I started a new painting while talking on the phone long distance to a best-ever friend.  We took a two night trip with just the six of us (the only way we could manage a meal together this crazy summer) to Leavenworth.  I hugged my dear friend Hope goodbye... back to China she goes.  We took Davis back to college in Canada.  Rich started his new year.  Laina is back in school

Note the little image of Laina in pigtails behind her.  Not intentional on my part but treasured.

and already made a new friend who's into music, drama and loves God.  I helped throw a wedding shower last night and SOMEWHERE in there managed to wash our sheets.

Whew!

Today at 10:00, I promised myself I'd start painting.  The dishes will have to wait and any deep blogging as well.

But Lisa said, you should blog your progress as you paint.  She was actually asking me to teach people how to do what I do, but I can't.  I've tried.  But I already felt compelled to blog.

FEARS:

-That people will tell me how to proceed when they can't see the finished result I have already in my head.

        So, maybe please hold advice to your own counsel until I'm done?  I'm too fragile at this emotionally.  These paintings may not be masterpieces, but they are from the most tender part of me.

-That someone will steal my design and profit from it.  I don't know how to copyright a work in progress.

        God has gently reassured me that there are other designs where these came from.  Any theft or imitation will already be passe by the time I'm learning the next thing.

-That I will fail.

      This is a given.  I want to try things I've never done before which means lots of it will fail while I experiment.  That's what trash cans are for... and erasers... and white paint...and forgiveness.

Anyway, it's 9:59 so I'll attach some pics of my new "artuary"  (My art studio corner feels like a sanctuary - thus, artuary.  So many thoughts on worship coming to my little mind as I consider a studio as a place to meet with God.)

Moving the piano to use it as room divider has meant the dear instrument now gets played all the time!

By pairing up IKEA book cases with their table tops, we created a stand up work station!  I ADORE it!

I painted my easel black and am using my grandmother's old sewing machine as a landing area.  I love looking out to the black patio furniture.  Purely accidental.

I used a coffee bag to cover the back of the piano and painted the drawer unit the same color as the walls.  Just a little fun to make it more inviting.

All those tubes of craft paint (bottom shelf) are in washed out salad boxes.  A bit flimsy, but hey, they were free.

So, timidly, I welcome you.  Please don't be offended if I forget you're there for a bit.  Once I get going, I tend to forget everything else.

Here's a little hint of the painting I'm about to start.

Fill your day with thanks!

love,  Lydia C



Designs and blog content   copyright 2015 Lydia D. Crouch