An artistic endeavor

When asked to reflect on our time here so far, I find it hard to say much simply because there is so much to say. I personally am finding things to work in extremes here in the mountains--days of extreme happiness and enjoyment in the work we’re doing here followed by days where nothing sounds better than my own shower and friends back home. Regardless, the constant shifting of both mental attitudes and weather conditions result in my growing understanding of what it means to live across the country from everything that is comfortable and work hard as part of both a YMCA environment and Calvin community.

This past week I had the opportunity to attend an interactive lecture about art therapy. Although admittedly I didn’t get much out of the talk itself, as am neither crafty nor patient, it was still an interesting experience. After a brief intro speech, the speaker asked us all to trace our hands and feet onto large slabs of paper (a disastrous endeavor for many) then proceed to decorate our drawn appendages using various crafty things representing how we use our hands and feet to glorify/serve God. The results varied from the club-foot with sporadic glitter splotches to the carefully formed hand replica filled with meaningful and artistically placed feathers or magazine pictures. However, aside from our varying artistic abilities and fights over scissors that barely fit on our actual hands, the activity was meant to instill in us a greater knowledge of how art can be used to help reach out to others. To represent this, we were all asked to lay our finished products out on the ground, the part of the evening where each of us was able to experience either the great swelling of pride at our handiwork or great knot of humiliation towards the smudge of paper that regrettably was our own. Moving past this emotional moment, we were next supposed to choose someone else’s hands and feet, find the person who took ours, then recite a Bible verse about hands or feet in order to reclaim our paper offerings. As I was only able to complete one poorly crafted hand during the time allotted for artistic creation, I was only required to find one such verse. The one I ended up choosing was Isaiah 41:13, which reads “For I am the Lord your God, who takes hold of your right hand and says to you, Do not fear; I will help you.” (NIV) I guess I liked the image of God physically grabbing your hand to guide you through the tough stuff. It’s a really tangible image of God as both support and companionship. Anyway. In order to motivate us and perceivably make the entire experience more fun-friendly, prizes were the inevitable result of being the first to reclaim all your 2D hands and feet. Again, only having one hand to bargain for, I was first finished, and proudly gave the speaker both my magazine-clipping smattered handish object and my selected Bible verse. After explaining that I only had one hand to share, rather than congratulating me on my concordance skills or perhaps exchanging a consoling glance regarding the state of my artwork, she instead stared at me as though I was crazy. Apparently four verses were required for all participants, as vaguely or not-at-all stated, though implied to all but the less-than-aware contestants like myself. welp. Able to move past this disappointment with little to no emotional damage, I decided 2 hours was much too long to spend in an craft-centered environment on a worknight, proceeded to call it an informative evening and take my paper hand home, leaving others to frantically Bible-bingo their way to the moral finish line.

And as I sit here in the Kiva, handing out skates and basketballs to people of varying degrees of politeness, I remember the verse about God taking us by the hand to keep us steady when everything around and beneath us seems to crumble, or even present itself as foreign, as is the case for many of us here this summer. And in remembering this, I am able to see the meagerly formed hand in my backpack not as a mockery of my dexterity with all things crafty, but rather as a reminder of what is possible when we stop seeing ourselves simply as poorly-crafted paper offerings, but rather as the hands and feet of God, capable of things beyond our imagination.

So despite the sickly blue walls, scissor shortage or perceived amounts of verbal blah, I conclude that perhaps my pilgrimage into the world of art therapy wasn’t such a waste after all. Go figure.