Let Art

Let go and let God--we struggle to see what this really looks like in a world where we have freedom and responsibility and where God exercises sovereignty. We struggle to see us and him at work together. We see him as painting, and we trying to add our brush marks. Or we as the canvas, and he does all the painting. Or we are the painters, and he has provided a picture of what it should look like; or he set up the canvas and the paints and which we play out creativity. 

But perhaps art is a metaphor for what it means to let go and let God (differentiated subtly but significantly from surrender or putting it in his hands). The potter with the clay, the sculptor with the marble, the artist with paints, the writer with a novel, the poet with a poem--we’ll all testify to something: when the art is good, it has a life of its own. It is birthed. It is found. There is an objective Beauty that must be expressed (and yet ever falls so short). We let go to that Beauty.

Yet, yet, it is birthed, fashioned, expressioned through labor. Time. Work. Sweat. Fingers cramping.

Letting go and letting God--he (and all analogies fall short), he is the Beauty that is to be expressed, that expresses himself. We artists labor with, in, through, by, for him. Beauty and artist not distinguished, yet all stand back and admire the art that captures a shadow of that Beauty, that gives a little-b beauty. We behold God as we let go and his life and his work expresses itself through our labor. It is birthed through us as we behold him, participate IN (not just with) him. We have a vision as we see HIM, and we see his vision for a situation. Letting go and letting God, then, is actively letting his Beauty express himself and his work in a situation as we labor. And we stand back and see beauty, like light flickers of the Son playing in the breeze across the meadow. Like the transcendence-almost-grasped-but-not in a piece of art. That is our let go and let God in all the storms, darks, blank impossible canvases.

“The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.” ~Michelangelo 

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” ~Michelangelo