Have Cheap Luggage, Will Travel

Artist Eyes

Part of my very extended college career took place at the University of North Texas in Denton, TX and if you have spent any time there you know that it is common to see people with tons of tattoos and purple hair wandering the campus due to the school’s emphasis on the arts. The artists even had their own dorm where humus and sprouts were served in the cafeteria. We always treated them like pets. Cute humans that we smirked at because of their weirdness and put in glass cages to watch from a safe distance.

Lately, I have started to smirk less and try to find a way to the other side of the glass. Isn’t there something special about someone who can see the world past our eyes? They can find musical rhythms in a car motor and sculptures in trash piles.

So what makes them different? How do they see what we do not? Some would say that they are born with a gift and while I think that is true, a real artist will cultivate this unique perspective and we can do the same

I heard a great story on the radio the other day about an artist retreat in New Hampshire called The MacDowell colony. Spread out over 450 acres of woods are 32 studios/ cabins filled with pianos, photography equipment and all kinds of other stuff to help these artists see past our eyes. What caught my attention was not the studios themselves but the simple solitude of the camp. As a resident, you eat breakfast and dinner in common areas but that is the only contact with the outside world. There are no phones, messages are only hand delivered in emergencies and your lunch is dropped at your cabin door without so much as a knock. No interruptions.

One painter described her experience after being there a month as a gradual decrease in thinking. She described her mind when she first arrived as a “laundry dryer full of garbage turning around and around with completely insignificant thoughts”. At the end of her stay she said her hand would move over the canvas almost with a mind of its own and when walking in the woods she could hear the crunch of the leaves under her feet and the rustling of the trees. Sounds that had previously been drowned out by her own cluttered mind.

Here is my point. How often do you think our laundry dryer minds drown out what God is trying to tell us? Our lives are filled with stuff. Places to be, books to read, clothes to buy. The list goes on and on. Artists see the beauty in the world because they take the time to look for it. Do we search with the same ferocious tenacity for the will of the Lord? Are we determined enough to hear it that we would travel to New Hampshire to lock ourselves away in a cabin?

Our culture wars against solitude, quiet, simplicity and all the other things that give us the room to see beauty and the God that made that beauty. So we must war against it with the same level of intensity.

Read: 1 Kings 19: 9-18
Ask: Where do we find the voice of the Lord in this passage? How should we seek Him?

Read: 1 Corinthians 2: 9-12
Ask: Do you personally think it is difficult to hear the will of the Lord? Why do you think it happens like that for you?