where the ink disappears to

Painting turtles with my favorite artista.

 

Sometimes I feel like I am writing in disappearing ink.

I labor late into the night over a 3 page scholarship essay but don’t advance to the next phase of competition. I meet with someone who is struggling and spend hours thinking about how to best help her, but she won’t respond when I try to reach out for follow-up. I pray for the same person every single morning but don’t see a whit of change in their life.

These moments of letdown, of stasis, of seemingly fruitless waiting are torturous for a person who wants to get stuff done (a.k.a ME). When I pour myself into an effort that doesn’t yield results, it feels like I’ve just written pages upon pages, only to realize that I was using disappearing ink and all of it has vanished – all the emotions, all the energy, all the time.

But I cling to a truth very different from what I sometimes feel. I believe that God is working in space and time, weaving every “wasted” minute into a triumphant plot twist that I am simply too short-sighted to anticipate.

Speaking of short-sighted, I am. Literally. Everything more than five feet in front of me melts into a watery blur when I’m not wearing glasses or contacts. My vision is worse than most peoples’, but since I live in an era and a country with excellent optical technology I don’t think much about it. Still, I can’t say I’ve ever given thanks for my limited sight. Not, that is, until a few Saturdays ago.

Two weeks back, I met a boy of around eight years old at the refugee shelter. I’ll call him Orlín. Orlín has been blind since birth; he has no idea what the sun or a house or even his own mother’s face looks like. I couldn’t tell at first because I found him zooming Matchbox dump trucks around the kitchen at just a few notches short of light speed. (Apparently Orlín had already felt around the room and figured out where the obstacles were.) His mom had to tell me that he was blind when he tried to join in a game that involved distinguishing between red and black playing cards.

Partway through the afternoon, I brought out my watercolor paints. Orlín wanted to paint with the other kids. He dipped his fingers into the water dish I gave him to make sure it was full and clutched the red plastic paintbrush with a vice grip. I asked Orlín which colors he wanted, and there was – of course – a long pause.

“Rojo, azul, verde, amarillo, morado…” I began to list off the colors in my box.

“!Todos los colores!” Orlín answered. All of the colors!

Wrapping her hand around his clinched fist, another shelter volunteer showed Orlín where the colors were on his palette. Orlín has no way of understanding what colors are, but he memorized their names and could tell when one of them was running low – “!Necesito más azul!”, he would command, waving his paintbrush at me as if it were a scepter.

Orlín leaned low when he painted, his face just inches from the page. Every so often he looked up at me and asked,

“?Qué pinté yo?”

“El mar,” I would tell him. The ocean.

“Como se ve el mar?” What does the ocean look like?

“Your ocean,” I said to Orlín, “Is blue, but it turns green when the sun hits it. The sun is warm and golden, which is why there are threads of gold in your ocean. The sun is mixing with the water. Es bellísima – it’s so beautiful!”

Sometimes I told Orlín that he was painting a forest with green-capped trees, or a red and yellow flower. But he painted with gusto and every picture wound up dripping wet and saturated with color. In the end, Orlín agreed that all of his paintings were oceans. Before I left he asked me,

“?Dónde están mis cuatro mares?” Where are my four oceans?

Visits to the shelter are always precious to me. I try to at least summarize my experiences when I get home so that I don’t lose them. But even if I had never written about Orlín, I know I couldn’t forget him. Orlín - the boy who could not see colors, but loved them anyways.

And the question Orlín asked me more times than any of his other (many) questions will likewise never leave me:

“?Qué pinté yo?” What did I paint?

When circumstances enter my life that seem like (to quote my dearest Kay Ryan) “monuments to randomness”, when I spend days on end writing in disappearing ink, I have no reason to lose heart. I only need to look up at God and ask him, “What did I paint?” After all, He is guiding my hand through every brushstroke. He would never trace an irrelevant curve or drawn a pointless line.*

 

*Geometry pun 100% intended.

 

I have seen God’s resourcefulness come to bear in my life time and time again. In eighth grade, my family was kicked out of our speech and debate club. The change was abrupt, unfair, and devastating. Through speech and debate I had found, for the first time, an entire group of people that shared my passions and interests. Suddenly, the community I had put more stock in than any other was taken out from underneath me. Did that loss feel pointless at the time? Absolutely. But it became one of the most positive things that ever happened to me.

When I lost my speech and debate club, I became conscious that I needed the church. Church was no longer just a place I went every Sunday with my family; it was a community of people bound together by ties so much stronger than shared interests. God knew that I needed His people. He put me through a trial so that I could realize where my loyalties must lie.

And I can honestly say that few things bring me more joy than being part of the Church – not just the universal Church, but also my local church, Believers Fellowship. Of course it’s not always easy; family life never is. But even in the fiercest storms I am enfolded in the hearts of people who love Jesus, people who draw me closer to Him and to the joy that is Him.

The truth that God works all things for good never changes, but it is changing me. I hope you will let it take hold of your heart and transform it until you hardly know what’s happening inside of you. Then you ask God. He is painting something beautiful there – He promises.

--

Food for thought:

Odd Blocks, by Kay Ryan

Every Swiss-village

calendar instructs

as to how stone

gathers the landscape

around it, how

glacier-scattered

thousand-ton

monuments to

randomness become

fixed points in

finding home.

order is always

starting over.

And why not also in the self,

the odd blocks,

all lost and left,

become first facts

toward which later

a little town

looks back?

 

“Let Your work appear to Your servants

And Your majesty to their children.

Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us;

And confirm for us the work of our hands;

Yes, confirm the work of our hands.”

~Psalm 90:16-17~

 

 

The finished turtle!

Olivia wanted me to pose with my pictures...although, for the record, she helped me *a lot* with the mermaids. ;)