In my office, sitting on the sill of the window directly in
front of my desk is a piece of driftwood. It’s about a foot long, is fairly
straight, contains a couple of interesting small knots in the grain, and like a
lot of driftwood is bleached white. It’s utterly ordinary, but very precious to
me. Several months after I brought it home friends stayed in our home as they
traveled to visit family in Iowa, and the kids apparently played with it. At
any case I discovered the stick was broken in two after they left. I never
considered throwing it out, but got glue to repair it. The break can be seen,
but the driftwood is in one piece. I picked it up almost a decade ago, but it
still is meaningful to me.
I picked it up on the north shore of Lake Superior. It had
been thrown up on the rocks by the waves, and was just one small stick of
driftwood among many I saw that day. I chose it because it was handy, and would
travel home easily. That week a year of spiritual dryness had come to an end
for me. It had been a year of disappointment, sorrow, and pain, a year during
which I never once sensed God’s presence, or felt myself moved by Scripture
whether to comfort or convict, or in some way felt that my prayers were heard—nothing,
but dryness. That week the drought broke, creativity flowed, and for a few days
it seemed that God was speaking to me in the Scriptures. I went for a walk
along the shore and picked up the little stick of driftwood so that I would not
forget.
Today as I look at the driftwood I am impressed by the
memory but not by the stick. It is very ordinary, nondescript really—to me it
looks just like the rest of the driftwood the waves have tossed ashore.
One of the wonders of grace in this broken world is how
differing gifts allow people to see ordinary things in remarkably different
ways. I remember how my wife Margie once brought home a derelict old ruin of a
chair she had bought at a garage sale. I thought it a waste of money, but
Margie saw it with different eyes, and when she was done reupholstering and
sanding and staining the wood, her perspective was realized. The chair still
sits in our living room.
I see driftwood, and can see it clearly enough to find a
single stick to remind me of a moment of importance in my spiritual pilgrimage.
But driftwood to me is just driftwood, odd shapes and odd pieces that can be
found in odd piles along the shore. That is not, however, how Heather Jansch
sees driftwood. A sculptor who displays remarkable creativity, she sees beyond
the separate pieces to how they can fit together to be more than mere
driftwood. And when Jansch is finished, the works of art she has created seem
to move, and breath, and be alive in stunning ways.
Look at the art of Heather Jansch, and wonder at the grace
of creativity, the glory of art, and how the artistic gift can allow someone
see something extraordinary in ordinary things—even in ordinary pieces of ordinary
driftwood.
This entry was posted
at Monday, November 29, 2010
and is filed under
Art,
Beauty,
Creation,
Creativity
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