Keeping Life in Perspective

Most people who will read this reflection lead busy lives, seeking to achieve a variety of personal, family, and career goals. To be fully engaged in life is a good thing, but sometimes our daily existence can become so filled with good things that we lose sight of an important reality that helps us remain grounded in our life with God. As C.S. Lewis reminds us, maintaining a daily awareness that Jesus Christ is coming back is needful for a healthy soul.

The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph. This seems to some people intolerably frustrating. So many things would be interrupted. Perhaps you were going to get married next month, perhaps you were going to get a raise next week: you may be on the verge of a great scientific discovery: you may be maturing great social and political reforms. Surely no good and wise God would be so very unreasonable as to cut all this short? Not now, of all moments!

But we think thus because we keep on assuming that we know the play. We do not know the play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. The Author knows. The audience, if there is an audience (if angels and archangels and all the company of Heaven fill the pit and the stalls), may have an inkling. But we, never seeing the play from outside, never meeting the characters except the tiny minority who are “on” in the same scenes as ourselves, wholly ignorant of the future and very imperfectly informed about the past, cannot tell at what moment the end ought to come. That it will come when it ought, we may be sure; but we waste our time in guessing when that will be. That it has a meaning we may be sure, but we cannot see it. When it is over, we may be told. We are led to expect that the Author will have something to say to each of us on the part that each of us has played. The playing it well is what matters infinitely.

The doctrine of the Second Coming, then, is not to be rejected because it conflicts with our favorite modern mythology. It is, for that very reason, to be the more valued and made more frequently the subject of meditation. It is the medicine our condition especially needs. 

Jesus himself says that when he returns, people will be “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage.” Preoccupied with the busyness and distractions of life, most will be unprepared to meet him. If we want to live sober, godly lives in this corrupt generation and to “play our part well,” a daily discipline of reminding ourselves of his imminent return can do wonders for us.

“Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.
Matthew 24:44 (ESV)


from the C.S. Lewis Institute, April, 2009

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pinterest ramblings

hula lady

I love the bright colors and bright words of photographer and creative Hula Seventy. I've stalked her blog a long time now and have that weird sense of "if I knew you, I would LOVE you!" sort of internet thing. Which undoubtedly creeps people out and rightly so. But she's been really honest and great throughout her whole time of blogging, and painfully so in regards to losing her mom.

I've been sad and grumpy around mother's day this year with all the advertising of "just what Mom needs" being mostly crap jewelry and clothes. With my own mom in a care facility for dementia patients, what I feel "mom needs" has drastically changed. And I have no idea if there's anyone on earth who can give it.

So thanks, Hula Seventy, for giving me some brightness and for going through all this just one step ahead. I'll keep checking in randomly, knowing you will be finding the good in all of it just when you're meant to. God bless, sweet lady.

all images from her blog.

a new favorite [illustrator] and an old favorite [book]

A new edition of one of my favorite books from childhood came out last year from Penguin Books. The special 40th anniversary cover was illustrated by an artist that I love, Emily Sutton, whom I discovered via St Jude's of Britain. I would love to have this edition but alas, it's only available in the UK. Maybe I can convince a pal to nab it for me. Beautiful cover to a riveting story about...bunnies.

More of Emily's work posted below, from her website.

**ordered it. ebay has them! whee

the English bulldog

Swapped a pencil for a needle.

Getting some long-languishing projects much closer to completion...
feels good to use a slow, grey day this way.

Let my armies....

One must train...

Most everything starts with a sketch.

I've had a few requests for the process of some mosaic-themed art I've done for my church, so I will post here when I can about it. The main question some of you have had is how I created the banners, which are mighty big, and about the mosaic tiles, if they are all hand-made.

So here goes.

I was given the theme and the subject matter from the client (ie, my church), which is, in this first pair, the below:

Thankfully I was able to be super rough with my sketches; we've all worked together before so they knew that I would be executing the artwork in much more detail than shown here.

I also showed them some of my favorite examples of mosaics throughout history, so we could clarify how I was hoping these to turn out. Always one of my favorite types of artwork, mosaics are also one of the oldest and luckily, more permanent, samples of art and life from past times. The amount of detail, color, interest and life in some of these old remnants is amazing and, I can imagine, breathtaking in real life.

Here are a few that I had bookmarked from various places on the internet:

And my favorites since I was a nerdy little kid living in the local library, Justinian and Theodora:

Check out that detail! The luminosity! The fabric that seems to leap off the page! And those eyes that surely seem to follow you around as you view the loveliness. I would love love to go see this one. I encourage you to click on the images and look as closely as you can. Wow.

The research was almost more fun than the work. There are tons and tons of well-preserved (and not-so-well-preserved) mosaics from Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and even more modern times. Gorgeous, gorgeous work. I urge you to look them up at libraries and online and see how vibrant and lifelike these works of art could be. I kept looking back at these and many, many more as I started to work out how I was going to imitate this style in a manner that could be printed at large size (the banners) and small (bulletins, programs, etc.). As a designer/illustrator in this day and age, we use the ever-familiar tools of Photoshop and Illustrator instead of stone and glass cubes and cement; it was here that I started by creating an Illustrator document the size of one of my banners. In this case, the document size was 54 x 108 inches. Quite big, even in Illustrator.

Then I took my approved sketch and sized it way, way, way up, and pasted it into my Illustrator document.

Then I was ready to start experimenting with making the mosaic tiles themselves, and to start the laborious process of laying them out. I also was experimenting with different color palettes at this time. Both steps were time-consuming, but we knew that once this was decided here, it would be implemented on all the rest of the banners (6 total so far) and this work wouldn't have to be repeated.

After some testing and cutting out little squares of paper and taping them on the chapel wall and looking at it from the back of the church we decided the tiles needed to be about 1.25 inches approximately in order to be seen crisply from the back of the chapel. So then I had an idea of just how much work this was going to be! Tons of clicking commenced. I'll show more next time of the actual process of making all those hundreds of tiles and varying the shapes and sizes so they would look more like an actual, hand-made mosaic and, hopefully, not like it was just 'made on the computer'...which, contrary to popular belief (even my own dad!), is not an automated machine, but merely a tool which we use to create. It's a pretty great tool, though.

hearts r us

i don't normally love the overused heart motif (ba dum bum) but i created a version of this for a women's retreat and it was warmly received. and since i saw st. patrick's day schlock in stores this week, i figured i'm not really ahead in posting this.

four calling birds

If you'd like a Christmas tweet for yourself or someone who likes writing (or for hand-written messages any time of the year), we've got lots of these bird cards for purchase at the site of Juicebox Designs. Clockwise from top left we have the Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atriacapillus), the Canyon Wren (Catherpes mexicanus), the Tufted Titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor), and the Cactus Wren (Campylorynchus brunneicapillus).

These are printed on 80# True White French Speckletone Paper and are especially lovely upon which to write. Matching envelopes, set of 12.