Light, Dark, and Garbage Art

If you do a web search for "Garbage Art", you will find a plethora of examples of beautiful things made from some not so beautiful stuff. Pictures of people, animals, nature scenes. 3D sculptures of all kinds. Ones that are funny, some that are sweet, others that might make you weep. They all tell a story using stuff that gets discarded every day. Bottles, cans, plastic bags. Broken umbrellas and pieces of appliances. Some are laid out flat, like a painting on the ground. Others tower over you, each piece carefully secured to keep the image intact. Some of my favourites though appear to be nothing more than piles of junk. Until you shine some light on them.

Then the shadows show you what was really going on in the Artist's mind. You can see how specifically placed each item is, chosen for it's ability to produce the desired outline. It requires a special sort of vision to be able to see the final image when all anyone else can see is a heap of trash. It takes patience and tenacity to place and replace the same broken toaster a hundred times until it sits just right. What appears to be chaotic and useless can project the image of something else entirely. Faces, flowers, skylines. Even some where the image will change based on the location of the light source. It doesn't change the nature of the items. They're still garbage. The light just reveals a different story than the one we see on the surface.

My boys and I are working our way through the Bible, and right now we are smack dab in the middle of one of the most chaotic and dark periods of the Old Testament. After King Solomon, Israel split into two kingdoms, both of which experienced years of war and poor leadership. The southern Kingdom of Judah had some reprieve, with a few good kings who sought God and made an effort to get things back on track, but overall things were not going so well. The people had turned their backs on God and His covenant with them. Even after God sent His people in to exile in Babylon, they continued to compromise with the cultures around them, worshipping idols and forgetting the laws of God. I think it's safe to say that in the time between the death of Solomon and the birth of Jesus, there was a lot of garbage. But if you read closely, you can clearly see God at work, positioning it all to fulfill His purposes and bring the promised Messiah. Every time God's people went off the rails, He would adjust and reposition them so that the final image was exactly what He planned. Even the crucifixion of Jesus is an example of God taking the abandoned, broken, and corrupt to bring about something beautiful: The salvation of the world.

I want God to create the same kind of art with my life. To use all the things that have happened to me over which I had no control and the things I did that I regret, and make something else with them. Something better. I want Him to use all my joys, and triumphs, and sweet memories. All of the sorrows, and tragedies, and heart breaks. I want to listen to Holy Spirit as I pile the events of my life in the middle of the room and do the hard work to position them in such a way that when God's light shines on them, the story the shadow tells is one I can be proud of. It doesn't change the nature of the things I have gone through. The good stuff is still good, and the crappy stuff still sucks. However when I am done, I want the image on the wall to be one full of hope, joy, and gratitude.

If you are currently staring down a pile of what feels like garbage, I want to encourage you. Don't stop now. You may not have had control over what is in your pile. Maybe there are things that you would rather not have anybody see. The garbage is not the whole story. You are an artist, and you get to decide what story your life will tell. Take your light, your dark and your garbage, then let Him use it.

Use it all, and make something beautiful.