The Painting Or The Artist, Which Came First?

[Image by Greencolander]


You Can Listen To This Post's Podcast Here: 


Listen!



You're an artist, untested, unproven, and unexposed to the world. Highly enthusiastic about the painting conjured in your head, although it is not yet splattered on a white canvas or a plain sheet of paper. A mixture of primary colors, a jumble of city streets, traffic lights, and sky-scrapers. A blue-white heaven, cotton balls, and a yellow sun. Layers of clouds, a white streak cutting across the clouds due to the translation of an aeroplane straight across the horizon. These images have been imagined long before you pick up a pencil or a paint-brush.

Birds flying high, beaks wide open, wings caressing the wind. Soft rain drops falling along slanting lines just in one segment of the city, women carrying pink polka-dot umbrellas, and men blue. Young girls holding the hands of their mothers, and young boys their fathers. New-born babies pushed around in their half-covered black strollers, dogs running around held tightly in their leashes. Soles of shoes and high heels making clinking sounds as they walk across the pavement, splashing water everywhere.

You insert a construction site. Road blocked off, orange cones, traffic re-directed. Men in yellow overalls, hard hats, safety glasses, boots, and gloves. Tall ladders, conveyor belts, assembly lines, elevated wooden platforms, cranes, and tractors. Men speaking to each other, outlining the master plan, architects, engineers, and builders.

* * * 

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden...Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven. Matthew 5: 14-16

You, my friend, are an artist long before you pick up a pencil or a paint-brush. You have the copyright to these images, you have the pictures in your head, long before you place them on a canvas. You are indeed successful, long before you exhibit your designs. The images are in you, and you're ready to paint.

Many times God reveals something about ourselves that we haven't seen yet, and we shy away from it. But He is the God who speaks non-existent things into existence. BIG POINT: If you look carefully at that verse above in Matthew 5, you will notice that Jesus called us the light of the world even BEFORE we got a chance to shine before men. Did you catch that? So if the chicken comes before the egg, then the artist comes before the painting (or whichever way you want to see it).

Question for the day: How do you define yourself, before or after the act? (the word 'act' meaning a show of capacity).