Epiphany Squared

She hasn't drawn since she was a young child. She used to draw paper dolls, she just stopped. We decided it was ok to draw the apples blue. She is very young and very brave.

My first attempt. I drew with my mentee.

My second attempt. I drew while I listened to this new girl's story.

My mentee's version. She loves color.

The beauty of art ministry is that it opens doors. The question is will we have the courage to walk through them when they open or will we shut it down. The kids and I mean kids God sends me, need someone. And the fact that I have gone through what I have gone through, does not disqualify me, it qualifies me unless all you care about is appearance. Appearance doesn't heal, it doesn't open doors, it doesn't please God. It isn't real. But it is real sad.

I would rather have a room full of little girls like the one I found today than a room full of respectability.

Thanks but no thanks. You did me favor.

Epiphany Squared

My youngest, no my baby slams
the screen door I love and
heads out to tomorrow .
I am sure.
I glimpse an opening into
something bigger than
what it seems.
He hops into the SUV
with friends and they
head west to the airport and
I retreat into my thoughts and routine
But the wonder of it all lingers.
Something bigger than it seems.

Spread before me
The blues and golds
The linear shapes are told
We create the colors
Of this life, the strife
Corrects us in unexpected ways
She speaks and it seems
Her story overlaid in me
my own
I know of what she speaks
It wounds me
It seems
It calls me to Him
It shows me a plan
That must be
Epiphany again
The something bigger than it seems.
And in the chalk lines we lay down
fill with colors of our lives
tell story of the strife
The whys we felt
We had to leave
The fight we face
Consumed by grace
Her life overlaid in me
And I see again
The why.
Her name is like a flower.

This is the best I can do right now......... I need to talk about this... but I don't know where the words are. She asked me if I was a grandma and then she let her story spill out and it overlaid in mine and I understood it all and why I was there. There has to be a plan and a way to survive. No thrive.

Found this.... what I mean by strife.

[Strindberg's] recovery from this dark night of the soul, under the tender care of his mother-in-law, led to a radical transformation in his personality, his religious beliefs, and his approach to theater. Whereas Strindberg formerly believed, for example, that what passed for love between men and women was strife, a crude Darwinian struggle for supremacy resolved only through the victory of one sex over the other, by the time he writes A Dream Play he has abandoned his Naturalistic strategies and misogynistic dogmas and embraced a kind of rueful asceticism modeled on Eastern religions.

Strindberg's change in mood was further influenced by the dissolution of his third marriage, to the actress Harriet Bosse. Previously inclined, and on the slightest pretext, to accuse his female partners of infidelity, lesbianism, careerism, uncleanliness, sloppy bookkeeping, and trying to emasculate him (his model was Hercules, robbed of his club by Omphale and forced to do female tasks), Strindberg was beginning to concede that he might share some of the blame for the way his relationships had been unraveling. Trapped in a repetition compulsion, he recognized that he was producing the same neurotic patterns over and over again.

from Dreaming a Dream Play
Robert Brustein on Theater. New Republic, 00286583, 01/15/2001, Vol. 224, Issue 3