The Painting.

Painting. I love painting. It's something I haven't done in quite may possibly have been years. I'm not talking about painting the kitchen, as much as I'd like to paint the beige or off white walls that have surrounded our family for a while now,  I missed being able to pick up a brush and just paint with colors on canvas something beautiful. Most of my childhood I painted.  Trees, horses, landscapes of beautiful mountains, and serene oceans. I painted in my teen years with oil, changing the brush strokes on the canvas, until after a couple of weeks, it was just right. Sometimes I woke up and just painted the picture I woke up with in my head with perfect clarity. Art provided me with an outlet during the most difficult, lonely, and ugly times in my life.
Fast forward to now. An opportunity came up to have a painting and baking party at our abode and a childhood giddiness welled up in me. I was thrilled to have a real excuse to create something.  We had snacks and a sweet friend had pre-baked her amazing world famous cookies for us to snack on while we baked and painted! It was a great night! I started painting a blue background as we all chatted and enjoyed each others company. Blue brush strokes back and forth until the whole canvas was covered. Then I started painting a tree. It was a strong tree with roots and limbs.  And there I left the painting.  Enjoying the wonderful people and stories about what was going on in our ever changing day to day lives.
Soon everyone started departing and saying their see you laters, while I picked up a little and came back to the painting I had just left to sit on the table.   Determined and knowing it was late, I decided to finish this tree painting I had started. I looked at the empty branches and started to paint the leaves different colors in a specific pattern I had painted hundreds of times before. In a very short time, I realized I was very much out of practice and probably needed to alter my approach.  This is when I started dotting eccentrically colored paint all over the branches covering them until I couldn't see them any longer. It was drastically worse.  This last realization slowly crept to my awareness and I decided that it would be best to do a painting that was "abstract" to salvage what was supposed to be a long awaited work of art.  Knowing that all the paint would combine to a brown if I mixed it too much, I still proceeded in hopes that I could make this canvas be beautiful by putting more paint on it, covering it entirely. Looking down at the final product, I saw just mud on a canvas.  All that to look at mud.
At that point I just wanted to wash it all off and start over. And so I marched over to the kitchen sink and starting rinsing the canvas off with water. I rinsed and rinsed thinking all the paint would wash away everything.   To my surprise not everything washed. The deep blue sky remained underneath, was now a faint blue surrounding the perfectly white, washed away tree.
I couldn't help but think, how we long for the perfectly planted roots that will make our life the beautiful, fruitful tree it should be. Why do we feel the need to throw things on top of it to cover it, hiding its beauty because of what we think it should look like? God has given us these roots, trunk, and branches to grow into the wonderful tree he designed us to be. Let God be the rain that washes away the gunk of this world.  If we will only let Him, His roots and trunk will show and grow into the most beautiful tree ever.