This trip I have been
missing my “creative” outlets like painting and making things. (Ah to be
drinking coffee, baking cookies and painting in my studio apt…) ANYWAYS. God,
who loves me, blessed my heart in the last few days of ministry. Our contact
Peter said to me that we could paint a mural on any white wall we could find at
KWAN (A place where the homeless come for meals and rest) WHAT!? Ok cool. My mind first goes to a tree (if you
know how obsessed I am with trees, or see ½ of my art work) but what do you know there is
already 2 tree murals.
Ok.
God what do I paint?
“A stained glass
window”
“Mmmm… ok”
that is weird, I would
never think to paint that. (yeah, that’s how I know it was God)
Ok so now I need
something to go on the stained glass widow. So I thought about a heart and a
cross however that was going to look. When I started to sketch it out I was
slightly stumped and Shannon was over in the other room. So she came up to me
and said “Did you get anything else?” I told her yeah, like the cross behind
the heart… well wouldn’t you know that is the same picture she got. Ok
conformation for God, this is what we were going to paint.
So early Thursday
morning we rise and walk over, get to the paint and only like 3 out of the 15 are not dried out. I was
about to cry. I find the white (the one color I really needed) open it up,
ROCK HARD.
Ok deep breath Ashley.
I bring it down and we
try adding water to it. Nope. We prayed, and then Shannon said to add hot
water. So we did, then Bridget mixes away like a mad woman and what do we get!?
WHITE PAINT!
So in my vision I had
a giant sun and one of the beams was going behind the glass and shining
through, making those pieces brighter. I started to doubt with the lack of
paint and the white and said I wasn’t going to do it. Nope. Shannon encouraged
me to keep it and it will work. And after 7 hours… it worked.
The placement of the
verse was also from God, it was going to go down at the bottom and I didn’t like
it and Heidi, when I told her I wanted to move it to the side she said that is
what she saw. The Lord was just conforming with all of us, every detail.
And alas, as we were
painting I was praying and it came up “That your light would shine bright
thought all the broken pieces of these people’s lives to make something
beautiful.” Conformation from the Lord that this is what He does. This is why
we were to paint a stained glass window.
All of the broken
pieces of your life, no matter how shattered, big, small, God can, and will
place them all together and you use you to shine through for His Glory into
something beautiful. This mural is ALL for His Glory.
