The Glory of Searching

I love painting huge, wild compositions. Standing before a blank canvas taller than I am feels equally daunting and invigorating.

I recently completed my largest painting to date—a six-by-nine-foot acrylic on canvas. My dad, a commercial painter for decades, has been instrumental in teaching me tricks of the trade they won't teach you at craft stores. One of these: using drop cloth instead of prepared canvas rolls. This allows me to work on a much grander scale with only a couple extra prep steps.

I brought a six-by-nine-foot drop cloth to the studio, pinned it to the wall, and primed it. I had no plan, only a desire for texture. I began mixing paint into modeling paste and spreading it across the canvas with palette knives and trowels.

On a piece this big, modeling paste disappears quickly—cue the commercial solution: caulk. I used four tubes with various pigments mixed in, making a big, colorful mess. Something I often express while painting is that a piece will be ugly before it gets pretty. Honestly, the uglier it starts the better it will end. You must lay a foundation of horrific colors, that way the beautiful vibrant hues have something to compliment.

Then something tugged at my spirit: paint butterflies hidden in this chaos. I mixed leftover caulk and attempted one—immediately hating it. This wasn't artist self-criticism; it was genuinely ugly. If butterflies could sue for defamation, I would've gotten the papers that afternoon. A muddy purple smear defeated the piece's playful spontaneity.

But in my frustration, I realized something: I had already created all the butterflies the painting needed. They existed in the palette knife smears. I simply needed to take a deeper paint color and lightly define their bodies, adding lines to imply wings. I dipped into a watered down navy shade, doing just this.

This felt right. After outlining dozens of butterflies, the piece felt complete.

Sitting with the finished painting, I sensed a message: Sometimes the Lord has already given us what we need—we just need different eyes to see it. Though I'd followed my instinct to paint butterflies, I'd gone about it wrong, trying to create rather than reveal.

This is the difference between laboring on our own and laboring with the Lord. I feel it while painting—the shift between submitting my work to God and straining in my own strength.

One verse has been on my heart these past few weeks: Proverbs 25:2—"It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter."

There's no feeling comparable to seeking something out from the Lord. I love this verse because it reveals how God doesn't hide things from us, but for us—inviting us into discovery.I often wonder why God created the Earth, humanity—when He already knows the beginning and end of everything. Why create if you already know the outcome? I can't fully answer that question, and that's okay. But I think God simply desires to commune with us. I think He enjoys experiencing things with us, in our time, through our eyes.

The Lord works in mysterious ways. Sometimes that means whispering profound truths. Sometimes it means ruining a perfectly good painting with purple mess.