actual vs. potential

It can be nerve racking to be around artists. To render well, they see every pore; every unplucked eyebrow; every sag; every wrinkle. An artist sees brutal reality and records it. Picasso the novice.

But there's another side to artists--the perspective of the visionary. The need to embellish, update, clarify, distort, and perfect. To render things not as they are, but as the artist sees them. Picasso the cubist.

The Master Artist sees beyond pores, eyebrows, sags, and wrinkles to my anxiety, fatigue, blind spots, error, mess, conflict, darkness. He also sees who I will be: beautiful, released, growing, trusting, new, different, bright. HOPE.

May I be the kind of artist who, seeing the flaws, emphasizes the beauty.

speaking of bananas...

When Creed was really little, he asked me, "Mommy, what is the truth?"

"Oh," I started to reply, "the truth is...truth is...uh..." (this was going to be harder than I thought. Maybe a tangible illustration would help!)

"See the banana you have in your hand?" I asked him. He looked at it.
"If you told me that was a banana, that would be the TRUTH, because it IS a banana. If you say it's NOT a banana, that is NOT the truth."

He took this in.

"Oh!" he exclaimed, his face beaming with understanding. "YES!...the TRUTH is a BANANA!!"

It tooks us two years to undo that one.

In honor of my friend who's fallen in love

"Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable, and noble kind of love."
--Delmore Schwartz

"Love is a choice you make from moment to moment."
--Barabara De Angelis

"To love someone deeply gives you strength. Being loved by someone deeply gives you courage."
--Lao Tzu

"True love isn't so much a dreamy feeling that you have as it is an enduring commitment to give sacrificially--even, or perhaps especially, when you don't feel like it."
--William R. Mattox, Jr.

"You never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back."
--Barabara De Angelis

"To love at all is to be vulnerable."
--C. S. Lewis

proof of God's love

"While we were yet in weakness [powerless to help ourselves], at the fitting time Christ died for (in behalf of) the ungodly. Now it is an extraordinary thing for one to give his life even for an upright man, though perhaps for a noble and lovable and generous benefactor someone might even dare to die. But God shows and clearly proves His [own] love for us by the fact that while we were still sinners, Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One) died for us. Therefore, since we are now justified (acquitted, made righteous, and brought into right relationship with God) by Christ's blood, how much more [certain is it that] we shall be saved by Him from the indignation and wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, it is much more [certain], now that we are reconciled, that we shall be saved (daily delivered from sin's dominion) through His [resurrection] life." --Romans 5:6-10

All Glorious Within

“The King’s daughter is all glorious within…” Psalm 45:13a

I work
Toning skin and muscle
Firming shape
Buying products to cover and conceal
Dedicating time to beauty

But beauty fades with time
And then the real will be unhid
Who am I then—
A mask removed;
An empty shell?

Or will beauty radiate with time—
Surging from a toned heart,
A glistening soul emerging through wrinkles;
Shaped by grace-encounters with God—
The light of Beauty’s gleam.