The smell of the warm summer air

I made a new discovery recently.

And that is that God likes Radiohead.

No really, He does!

I’ve been avoiding listening to them a bit lately because I know that they tend to make me a little depressed. All I need to hear is “You and whose army?” on a bad day and I’m gone. But on the way home from work last week I decided to listen to “15 Steps”. But instead of getting all melancholy, I actually felt happy. 

This may be a bit hard to understand for people who don’t love music as much as I do, but I have a very deep emotional connection with music. I find it very hard to separate it from myself. Sounds bizarre but that’s just me.

So when I was listening  to “15 Steps”, which really is a cracking song, I was overwhelmed with the urge to dance, scream, cry, curl into a ball, grin like a manic, laugh and do various other embarrassing things that you shouldn’t do at a bus stop. I could feel God. All around me. It is a really hard feeling to explain. But I just knew it was Him. I felt optimistic. I felt joy. For a very brief three minutes, I felt hopeful.

See, God likes them. He used them to speak to me didn’t he?

Where two oceans meet

Ok, so yeah, my post Unlock the Door was a bit dramatic…ok more than a bit.

The thing I love about God is that He is extremely creative. He can use the most rubbish experience and turn it into something beautiful. Since Soul Survivor I haven’t really made anything. I’ve done the odd scribble in my journal, but overall I’ve sort of been squashing my creative impulses. This doesn’t sound like a good thing but I think it is part of a process. I have sort have been limiting my creativity to cute & crafty. I put myself into an Elsie Flannigan box. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Elsie Flannigan, but it’s not all I am.

It’s like, I took a piece of clay and moulded it into what I wanted it to look like. The whole Soul Survivor experience was like God squashing it flat and now, he’s slowly remoulding it into what it should be. I’m experimenting with my creativity and attempting things I haven’t tried before. God has given me passion for music, beauty, movies, books and particularly morbid things  for a reason. I’m trying to see how I can use all of those things for him. Making things makes me happy.

When I was at Soul Survivor, I went and saw the lovely Dusk speak about vocation and she used this quote.

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness & the world’s deep hunger meet” – Frederic Buechner

I’ve found my deep gladness, now I just have to find where it meets with the world’s deep hunger.

Unlock the door

At Soul Survivor this year I only sold two paintings which kind of crushed me a little*. The previous year I sold almost all the paintings I made – and I didn’t even like them! This year, when I put so much of myself into them and only sold two, it made me feel massively rejected.

Ok, so I know that this year there was a bit of a different crowd and sometimes people just aren’t in the right mood for art. I also know that I can’t expect everyone to love my art…or anyone for that matter. It’s just that for my entire life, this has been the one thing that I have been good at. I got an art award at school, my friends and family are always going on about my creativity – which, let’s be honest, I was quite ok with. That was me, Blair the creative one.

For the last year I have been toying with the idea of having my own shop and selling my art for a living. I know that this would involve a lot of hard work, but I was confident that there were people out there that would buy it. When this Soul Survivor market stall came up, I had it in my head that it was test to see if I would be successful.

So after getting to the end of the market, and only having sold two paintings, both to people I know, I felt a little more than mildly depressed. The one thing that I was good at was rejected.

I almost laughed. A friend of mine told me to “not take it personally”. Not take it personally? I put so much of myself into those paintings. How could I not take it personally?

I spent the next couple of days wondering what next. Maybe I wasn’t creative. Maybe people were just being nice. Was my art actually any good? If I wasn’t good at art, what was I good at then?

My entire identity was shaken. It still is a bit.

At Young Adults this week, our pastor and his wife came to talk to us about there experience of prophecy and the importance of it. One thing that’s really stuck in my mind is that whatever God gives you, give it away. So God has given me creativity (I think), I should use that for Him. But how?

It was really weird. I was thinking about all this yesterday and my job and my life and how I’m living from CD to CD. I was making coffee for one of the 1:45 regulars when one of them asked me “If you could get paid to do something that you love and get paid for it, what would you do?” I immediately said, “Paint and make stuff”. How funny.

So that ’s me at the moment. Just so you know.

 

*Understatement of the year.