Acrylic, marker, and pastel on canvas

10” x 10”

2019

This piece is one in a series of paintings that reflects the careful construction, sobering dissection, and total dismantling of some of my belief systems that couldn’t stand up to the power of life this past year. They crumbled. And I’m so glad they did.

The neat, subconscious, well-meaning compartments I had been handed early on in life were a carefully assembled puzzle of beliefs about God, myself, and the world, that I added onto and made look more like me. But they slowly began turning gray and stale with time and experiences. In what felt like an explosion of my life, I simply couldn’t deny anymore that they were unable to carry the weight of the authentic and terrifyingly real life before me. Turns out, things I thought I knew, I didnt. Things I thought I could count on unequivocally, I couldn’t. Now what?

The compartments began to form cracks as I started to ask questions I’d been too ashamed or afraid to ask. Someone else’s ideas I’d gobbled up as truth in adolescence began to break apart when I clung to what I did know intrinsically and let the rest fall away. Now I know that what felt like the destruction of everything good, easy, and reliable was actually God asking me if I was ready to stop hiding in the illusions of what kind of Abba he is, stop crumbling under the expectations of who I was “supposed” to be, and stop letting empathetic grace for others wear thin as I struggled to find goodness in the narrative I’d believed for so long. I said, “yes,” and there it all went.

It felt painful and desolate and empty as I cried out with questions and accusations and doubts I had shamed myself out of even thinking before. But slowly the fragments fell away and there was room for the simplistic truth with no conditions or exclusions or “buts.” Just lots of room for love and doubt and wonder and mystery and gray areas. These little shards of pain and confusion are being reassembled and composed into a beautiful and rich life of authenticity and love.