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Wow ... that was a long hiatus. I've been busy between school, work, and church. I kind of lost my zeal for posting without a camera -- but I have a new one finally. I have a few pages in my prayer art journal complete and a few more started I need to get back to.
This is a set of pages centered around the day I became a born-again Christian. My spiritual birthday is October 4th and a whole lot has happened since then. Some things have come clearly into focus and some out of focus. I am still sorting through quite a lot. I still have a lot of learn about the character of God.
Note: Everything I am posting here is past tense, as a number of steps along my journey have occurred already. I am giving myself some time to process before documenting the path God has laid before me.
I am going to college part time in the evenings working toward an Information Technology degree in an effort to transition into a new field with my agency. Some of the personal reflective writing assignments started breaking me down emotionally. By the end of the term, I felt like I had been run through a blender. I felt raw and it became clear there were unresolved hurts and feelings from a childhood riddled with trauma – and drama.
I never dared to commit my past to an art journal page before, but it seemed like a natural expression – a way to process things and a way for me to connect with God’s role in this drama.
Without a clear definition of what my past looked like, I just started the page … I knew God would lead me if I dared to follow. I placed strips of painters tape down the length of the page. I’ve never done vertical stripes, but it seemed important to have harsh vertical lines. The color ended up being quite important. Anyone who really knows me -- knows red is not my color. Red represents blood … anger … hatred … vengeance … and not necessarily my own – but it is the color of my past.
It took a few days for the layout to gel, but it seemed we were victims of a terrible puppet master – with the puppet master being a 17-year old girl. She was filled with anger, hatred, and most of all … malice; malice toward my father. She used anything and anyone (including her own family) to seek revenge against my father for an act he never committed. The rest of us were all puppets -- meant to inspire suffering upon suffering.
Where was God in all this? I can’t say exactly how he worked in my family’s life, but He protected me … and eventually He delivered a justice that only He had the power to orchestrate. There was no talk of God in our household --- most of us had never even set foot in a church and yet, as a 5-year old girl, I knew instinctively that only God could save me and that I must pray.
In recent months I have come to realize what a masterful hand He had – knowing each of us, how much we could bear, and how best to protect us while providing us life experience. And for me personally – my childhood suffering has yielded opportunity for a lifetime of growth. Accepting Christ into my life has meant at last, the puppet master strings of my past have been severed.
These are a few lines of a personal psalm I wrote, so to God I must say:
I exalt Your Majesty
For renewal and healing
Emancipating me from the shackles of the shadows
Welcome to my new blog. I also have a blog where I post my regular mixed media work at Karen's Altered Dreamz. I haven't been posting much there, as I have been on an emotional journey that is just beginning.
A few months ago I started attending a church not far from the college I attend in the evening and I am now entering my first baby steps into Christianity. My second week attending, our pastor and his family lost a child to anencephaly. They shared their journey with us through an amazing video at their daughter's service. You can read more about their journey and see the video at Baby Emily: A Family's Journey with Anencephaly.
The service and video were incredibly emotional, so I created a couple art journal pages in honor of this experience.
