Sometimes God gets our attention in the strangest of ways.  Sometimes we have to be brought to such a low that we have no other choice but to finally look up to something beyond ourselves for help and comfort. Sometimes pain is the only way we’ll ever see beyond ourselves. We don’t have to enjoy it, but we do have to acknowledge that our eyes sometimes have to be forced open to see what’s clearly in front of us. We as humans like to lie to ourselves, to cloak ourselves in thoughts and ideals that make us feel comfortable. We tend to sway with the opinion of authority figures and those that hold influence so that we don’t have to face the multitudes with an ugly thing called the truth. We’re afraid of the truth in a way, because if we know the truth then we know we are obligated to share it, no matter the cost. Most of us are terrified of this because sometimes the truth means you lose friendships, respect,  your job, your dignity, and perhaps even the love of a spouse. I suppose in the end we have to make the decision to choose an uncomfortable life on earth or an uncomfortable life hereafter.

I’ve been  reading my Bible more than I have in the past few years, cross-referencing it with any historical documentary I can find, and listening to the writings of CS Lewis on my down time at work or at home. The story of CS Lewis is an amazing one, and a pretty tragic one. He had such a heart for God and was such a brilliant mind that he was able to contest objections with humor, class, and a good spirit. He was able to do this so well because he himself once considered himself too intellectual to believe in something such as God. He lost his mother at an early age and fought in one of the world’s most bloody wars. He held friends as they died and was forced to kill himself. He questioned the existence of anything that could be all good and loving in those conditions but even he had to face the fact that he would have no idea of what good and loving was without there being a universal unspoken standard of these things. He couldn’t know what evil was without first knowing what good was. It was Tolkien who first challenged his doubt. Tolkien was another brilliant mind  but he had never doubted his faith to such a degree that Lewis did. Of the two,  Lewis is the one who  is remembered for his powerful words and apologetics, not Tolkien. God can use even the doubting heart. God can use men who were once against him because those men understand well the objections and pain associated with men of doubt and they know exactly what to say to bring them to question themselves. In the Bible, God used a man who had outright persecuted the  Christians to spread the gospel. Paul was not a good guy. He was more than an unbeliever, he was a persecutor and a blasphemer. Still, God had the power to sway his heart and Paul became one of the most powerful voices for early Christianity because he understood where the unbelieving world was coming from.

Myself? I’m not ever going to understand the complexities of science. I’ll never be able to pass a chemistry class or memorize every theory and equation. I have to take math classes multiple times before I can earn a passing grade. All of that makes a person intelligent, not wise. I admire people who can explain the complexities of a cell or an animal’s digestive system. I still can’t tell you what PH level a lawn needs in order to grow green or how calculate how many ounces you need to make anything else. I suppose in a sense that’s just not how I was designed. My mind doesn’t need to be brilliant to have understanding or to be able to reason  at all. When the police train a man to find false checks they don’t have him  study the frauds, they have him study the real thing. Once the man knows the real thing backwards and forwards, fakes become very apparent. He doesn’t have to know how the fakes are made or anything else- only that they’re false. In that sense, the Christian can spot a false belief because they are so familiar with the truth. I don’t doubt the existence of my own father because I know him. I speak with him every day and I can feel his arms around me. If someone were to tell me that my father didn’t exist I would think them mad because I know otherwise. In the same way, I know that my heavenly father is there. I speak with him every day. When I lay down at night and feel a strange, unworldly peace fill my heart and mind I know that he’s taken me into his arms. Knowing God isn’t based on any equation, theory, or appeal to authority. It’s a relationship of a very personal kind.

Beyond that, I see his handiwork in everything and I hear his voice in stirrings and musings. My mother got into an argument with her own father, my grandfather, about the existence of God. Grandpa is at the end of his life and desperately wants to die. He’s buried two of his sons and his wife. All he has left is his daughter and grandchildren. He wants to die to end his misery but he has no love for God. I find it very odd that Grandpa professes not to believe in God and insists that he hates him for the injustice in his own life in the very same breath. My grandfather is one of those people who believes that we share lineage with the common house fly and demonstrated this by smashing one on the coffee table. He asked my Mom what happened now that the fly was crushed. My mom told him simply that the fly was crushed, that was it. Grandpa nodded and responded that that’s what would happen to him when he died- nothing. He would just be gone. Mom pointed out that humans are not flies. We are not animals. We are not some accident of genetic popcorn. Flies do not  worship a fly god, zebras do not stop and weep when a lion kills one of the herd,  apes do not enter into philosophical debates, and trees do not protest anything. Humans were created in the image of God himself and God was never a cell, an amphibian, or a rat-like creature. God was as he is now- he’s constant and consistent. He’s the same as he was yesterday and tomorrow. We were created in his image, so we share so many things with him.

Why do we do art? Because God himself is an artist. Anyone who looks at a sunset or a misty morning in the hillside can see that quite clearly. God invented color and lighting, he designed butterfly wings and the plumage of birds. Everything that we find to be beautiful was made by his hand. Anything that we wish to create through art is only inspired by things that he has already created. We could never hope to create anything outside of his creation, so nothing is original to us. When we write stories, we are creating a fantasy world because that desire to create is as part of our own nature as breathing. Men have desired to create since Adam. Pyramids that defy our modern understanding still stand, carvings of beasts we believe to be extinct before our time decorate temples in the deep jungles, cities rise up all over the world- and still we want to create more. Why do we debate and argue? Because we want to know the truth, we want to learn, we want to understand. This comes from our desire to understand and know. God knows all things and this thirst for knowledge was made a part of us. We pour through books, we go on expeditions, we dive to the bottom of the sea and climb up the highest mountains. We also love.  Love is something that humans have come to misunderstand more and more, however. Love doesn’t just mean a physical activity with a person or an attraction to someone. That’s part of one small aspect of love but it isn’t the end result of it or even a side note of it. Love sometimes is a damn painful thing. Love is something we have to choose, and are commanded to choose. We’re told to love our enemies but this is not something that comes naturally to us. Love isn’t natural at all if you want to be completely honest. There’s no survival benefit to love. Love can drive us to do powerful things, true, but it can also drive us to do horrible things.

Love is the strongest proof of God in my opinion because Love is something that we cannot explain by any means. There’s no love gene, no love chemical, no love drug. Love is something that cannot be touched, put into a bottle, and painted green. Love speaks so much of God’s true nature and it’s something that he placed into every one of us. Every human has the capacity for greatness because they have the ability to love. Love is selfless in every sense of the word. You cannot think of yourself if you choose to love someone that openly spits in your face, mocks your beliefs, or treats you poorly. You must choose to love the people that despise you, and it’s very likely that in doing so they’ll only hate you more. You must choose to put your own emotions aside- resentment, anger, hurt, and misery- and instead force yourself to feel love for someone that honestly doesn’t deserve it. We’re commanded to do this because it’s what God does for us. He knows everything about us, he knows that we spit in his face, praise his creation rather than him, and lift ourselves up as gods but still he chooses to love us. In fact, he chose to love us so much that he also decided to express love in the ultimate way.

Love’s truest expression is not in a kiss or what comes after. Love’s ultimate end result is when one person chooses to lay themselves down for another. God demonstrated this himself and if you think about it, it goes against everything natural. Jesus was the perfect human- the fittest being, and yet he surrendered his own survival for the unfit. This love is the strongest thing  in our natures and yet it is so destructive to us. We may not all jump in front of a bullet for another, but we sacrifice parts of ourselves in expressing love. I know that there will be people who take offense by this journal entry and I risk being excommunicated for it. I risk my friendship every time I confront a friend on these things. If you’ve ever lost a friend, you know that sometimes the pain you suffer for it is somehow worse than death in some ways. You wish for it because it feels as if your heart is being ripped away from you but your body is left to live on. The days following are empty, miserable, and lonely. You have no one to turn to  because you’ve driven these people away. However, being dishonest isn’t loving. If you know something to be true, you’re under obligation to share it. If you lie to your loved ones, how are you being loving?

These things are so uniquely human that I cannot deny that these are qualities of God himself and part of what he means by having created us in his image. We do not see elephants having deep philosophical debates. There are no cat cities or ape churches to a god. Animals do not sacrifice themselves for each other, nor do they build graves to their fallen. Animals will eat their dead or their young. They will abandon each other if it means their own survival. They do not mate for love, but rather for procreation. Animals do not keep pets or go hungry so another one of their kind can eat. Animals have no doubt about God, they follow his laws given to them in a fallen world.


This doesn’t mean that animals cannot show us a bit of God’s nature however. Several times in scriptures animals were God’s way of reaching humanity- both for positive and ill. We see these things today all the time. A little girl is protected from men who would have raped and killed her by a pride of lions. Swimmers are saved from sharks by a pod of dolphins. We see this quality every day in the creatures that we chose to be our companions. Our cats curl up beside us at night, pawing at us gently so we know we aren’t alone in that dark room. Our dogs come up with a ball in their mouth, wagging their tails and whining until we get off our backsides and play with them. Animals were a gift from God, They comfort us as much as they terrify us. They save us as much as they endanger us. On occasion, even animals defy what we deem as “natural behavior” to show us something unnatural and unworldly. Something that can never be tested in a laboratory or observed by great minds as a real thing. Instead, it’s something that connects us all, man and beast, to our ultimate source- God himself. There is love in everything because everything came from God. There’s beauty in everything, there’s reason and inspiration in everything because everything came from God.

Whenever I start to think too highly of myself or the progress of humanity, it’s a good reminder to step outside and look at the stars. In the grand scheme of things, we are a tiny speck. We cannot begin to even explain the creation from within- how can we begin to understand the being that stands outside of it? It’s humbling to think about, especially because the one who stands outside of the universe and still painted the wing of a butterfly cares so much about me- a tiny speck in a sea of specks - that he laid down his life for mine.

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."

C.S. Lewis

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

C.S. Lewis

"The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us."

C.S. Lewis

"If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."

C.S. Lewis

"We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be."

C.S. Lewis

"What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it."

C.S. Lewis

Some of these are pretty recent but there are a few that are slowly gathering dust. I'm leaving them up as a reminder to myself (and hopefully the other artists involved). 

At this point...these sit here as "Buyer Bewares": 

Two character full body lineart from - My end of the trade is complete as of September 14, 2009

Five Chibis from - Paid on December 29,2012 | 1/5 received |

 

Seriously! How beautiful is this?! I cannot thank enough for giving Thalion some life this year. He's one of my oldest, most dear characters and she's captured him perfectly. Thank you so much! ;A; He's stunning!

and myself decided it's about time we start up a group for ParaChiMar: The Legacy of Para. For those interested this group is pretty much just a good place to dump all of our LoP artwork, trades, commissions, and fanart into. I've also made a small stamp collection to celebrate. Check us out. :3

 

Mature Content

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