"Yes, I (Jesus) am the gate. Those who come in through me will be saved. They will come and go freely and will find good pastures." John 10:9
"The Lord is my shepherd; I have all that I need. He lets me rest in green meadows; He leads me beside peaceful streams. He renews my strength. He guides me along right paths, bringing honour to His name." Psalm 23:1-3
This pen and ink drawing came as a result of one of the suggested prompts I shared in a post about the Art of Prayer. It's my meadow.
Although it's a black and white image, I see it in glorious colour. The grass is the deep green of mid summer, dotted with purple and yellow wildflowers. The mountains are shades of lavender and gray, highlighted by the silver of the sunless sky. The clouds barely hold the sun at bay as shimmering beams break through in Jacob's Ladders of gold and orange and white.
The stream is a thousand colours of blue and gray and green. Green covered stones make the water sing and laugh and burble joyfully.
The flickering buzz of a dragonfly's wings makes me duck away as it races past my ear. I've never heard a butterfly but they are there, too, feasting on the nectar filled flowers.
The pine trees stand as dark sentinels, guarding the base of the mountains. They whisper poems of awe and wonder as their branches are stirred by the fresh breeze coming off the mountains. Deciduous trees can't grow here because this meadow is closer to Heaven than I 've ever been before.
The time worn grays and blacks of the fence are subdued by the freshly painted, bright red farm gate. It creaks a bit as it sways but never hard enough to close off the way in and out of the meadow.
And there Jesus walks.
And I walk beside Him.
Smile. It would appear sharing about the Art of Prayer wasn't finished after all. When I sat down to write this morning, I had no idea this was where it would take me.
My meadow is a composite drawing, created by leaning into precious moments of stillness when I have sat and listened and looked. That's how these full on sensory photographs are seared into my mind. It's a form of worship, this being still with my mind at rest yet fully focused on everything that is around me. It enables me to close my eyes at any time and mentally "see" an object as though it was in front of me.
I might just focus on a single flower and watch the petals bend and flex under the weight of a bee, its busy buzz silenced for a moment as it probes the flower for food. Maybe the flower dances because of a miniscule hurricane created by the invisible wings of a hummingbird moth.
I might just focus on the sky, even if there are no clouds. It turns different blues depending on the season. I love the rich depth of an autumn sky.
And water. Oh, how I love to spend time looking at water. It has a thousand thousand different visual voices. Sound and sight go hand and hand when it comes to memory.
It just dawned on me as I took a momentary break...this worship practice is actually a form of controlled, in-the-moment, hyper-vigilance. Just like when I don't feel safe or am in a new environment, all my senses are turned into a full awareness of the least movement, smell and sound.
When it's worship, the fight-flight response is missing
When it's worship, I feel the presence of the Holy Spirit because the hyper-vigilance hasn't been ignited through my fears of the unknown. (Smile, I refuse to beat myself up about this any more. It is what it is and based on the post from a couple of days go, I won't have to wait 'til heaven to have this healed. I give it all to you, Lord.)
When it's worship, I see colours there are no names for.
When it's worship, it's a celebration of all that God has created.
What a gift God has given me, us. He has redeemed a fundamental piece of what makes us human by taking an instinctual survival response and making it His, for Him and His glory.
Maybe, when the evil twin of joyful worship starts trying to take over, I can now declare that the enemy of my soul has no right to take what is God's.
How cool is that! AMEN!
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