Audio: Rich and Poor in Proverbs

Proverbs was written with a wealthy, royal reader in mind, so it includes almost no advice for how to survive in poverty or how to get out of poverty. But it has a lot to say about how painful and unjust poverty is, it clearly shows the dignity of the poor, and it makes dramatic demands on those of us who are wealthy.

Audio: The Danger of Godless Godlikeness

We are called to be 100% perfect, just like God is, but we can’t try to become perfect in our own strength. We must receive our holiness from the God who is holy, basing the ways in which we are like him on our communion with him. When we try to shape our own holiness, rather receiving God’s holiness by being with him, we can fall away from God, just like Adam, Eve, and the Pharisees did.

Daffodils, painted for Michelle and Michael

Michael and Michelle are my awesome brother and sister-in-law. For Christmas, I decided to give them a painting of their wedding flower: daffodils.

This was super fun to make. I started impulsively, making abstract splotches of yellow, blue, and green before I had any final piece in mind. Once I had a color composition I liked, I used quick strokes of white and blue to erase as little of each yellow splotch as possible while revealing the form of a daffodil. I’m quite confident that I wouldn’t have come up with the variances in size and direction, nor in the off-the-frame flowers if I hadn’t been following previously abstract impulses. Next, I used as few strokes as I could manage to mark off the petals, and voila! the flowers were done, floating in space.

Next, I chose a grid that interacted with the flowers nicely and laid down stems, leaves, and grasses based on the grid. Then the hard part started. For a long time, I couldn’t find a color balance for the stems and background that I liked. Then, on an impulse that felt like giving up, I laid out the palette I’d chosen geometrically, with the lightest background color framing the center, the mid tone around it, and my darkest tone across two corners. I’d expected to paint over it right away, but I loved it. After some final color work, the painting was done.

I love the calm bounciness of this piece… its dignity and joy. Painted in acrylic.

Lamb, Painted for Sophia

Sophia is one of our goddaughters, and her favorite stuffed animal is Lamby. Lamby’s now super worn down with love. For Christmas, I decided to give Sophia an idealized painting of Lamby that could also be a painting of Jesus.

In the run up to making it, I’d been obsessed with Bonnard’s palettes and composition, while Sophia had fallen in love with Van Gogh’s Starry Night, so I tried to jam those influences together. I also knew that the painting had to shimmer with purples, Sophia’s favorite color.

The result is serene and delightful. Painted in acrylics.

Audio: Your Hometown Jesus

It’s not enough to have loved someone in the past, or to know them based on the categories they belong to. True love never ends, which means that it must always change and grow. If you love someone, you must be willing to love them as they change, or as your knowledge changes. The people from Jesus’ hometown made this big mistake: because they felt so familiar with Jesus, and so comfortable with their old assumptions about him, they were unable and unwilling to see him as he was. Like them, we can have a sweet, personal Jesus who’s comfortable and familiar to us. Unlike them, we should learn to lay aside our assumptions about Jesus and turn toward him again and again, eager to see him as he is. We must not worship a hometown Jesus of our theological creation; we must turn to worship the living, surprising God,