Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Sarah in Exile

My on-line persona is "Sarah in Exile." God brought me out of a beautiful and thriving city and plunked me down in the middle of the Pennsylvanian countryside. My husband and I both agree that we see the hand of God at work and that it was His Spirit who led us into exile, but it is exile nonetheless. I've been here nearly six months; it is a place where no one knows me.

God has stripped me down and crushed me ego. I went from being somebody to being nobody. I liked to fancy myself a big-shot artist who felt very proud of her accomplishments at such a young age. I was in the local paper so many times that I stopped saving clippings. I made local television appearances more than once. People knew who I was. Let me be honest, I loved it. I don't care much about money, but give me popularity, acclaim, even fame. It is delicious to me. I can eat it and never get full.

I can never get full because fame and popularity do not satisfy the longings of our spirits. God has so dearly loved me that he has crushed me. He is a jealous God. He has taken me into exile. Here I am nothing more than a middle-class, suburban housewife. My social status has been taken from me and it hurts to die.

But I see the hand of God. God has not given me this talent, this training and these opportunities so that I may be great, but so that I may be an extravagant lover of God. He gave me these gifts so that I can praise Him. In yesterday's post I poured out the misery I have felt as an artist over the years. "I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE!" I scream at God. "You have made a mistake in making me with this personality and these gifts. They don't work together. I cannot be an extrovert and work alone. I will die."

Exactly. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Matt 10:39)

If I know anything about God it is that He does not make mistakes. For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. (Psalm 139:13-14) God created me exactly as He intended to. I am His design, extrovert, distracted, fanciful, whimsical, artist and all.

But here in exile I have come to know that my calling is first to be a lover of God. "The most important [commandment]," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' (Mark 12:28-30) In his letter to Christian artists, Michael O'Brien tells us that the "essential task remains the same... to seek the will of the Father and the guidance of the Holy Spirit with your whole hearts. A life of prayer and sacraments—of union with our living savior Jesus—is absolutely essential, if we hope to bear good fruit in the world.

So, here I am in exile, learning to love God because he first loved me. I cannot seek the art, only Him. The irony is that the less I seek art and the more I seek Him, the greater the art will flow to my fingertips and the more Beautiful it will be. Only this time I won't be in my own personal hell like I have been in the past, but I will be nourished with a food that does not leave me hungry.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I've had some similar thoughts lately, although I've never craved the attention like that. (Hated being bragged about at high school graduation and the like; still do for the most part. Just want to be involved in good things and do what I love.)

However, in response to that thought — that commandment I must love God first — my mind reminds myself that we are stewards of these gifts (arts, crafts et al) He's give us and to ignore seems, or is, well, being a poor steward. That may not be exactly what you were saying, but it's what you post made me think of.

BELOVED said...

Wow. i stumbled across your blog and understood your journey. i am a painter, and have said to Him, "Let me die." as well when He brought me out of my Eygpt and into exile. It is true, the more we seek Him, and find Him, the more we find ourselves, and suddenly we will see that there is so much more to who we are then just artists.