Advent Day 3 ~ Expectation

Today's word is expectation.

Background image by Aaron Burden @unsplash.com

Isaiah 64 is a prayer of lament. I like how Dennis Bratcher, @crivoice.org, defines lament:

"Generally, a lament is a prayer that cries out to God from the midst of desperate grief, pain, or any circumstance that seems out of control. It vocalizes the hurt to God with the conviction, the faith, that God can and will bring relief. A lament is not just the venting of frustration, but is a profound statement of faith in God from the midst of utter human hopelessness. The significance of a lament is that the worshipper prays in the midst of his pain. He believes that God cares about His condition and he has enough faith in God to trust Him with the outcome."

This definition of a lament gives the impression, that even in the midst of pain and suffering, the prayer is rooted in hope. Hope and expectation are so deeply intertwined in the Advent season that it's easy to miss that there is a difference between them. 

Mounce's Complete Expository Dictionary defines expectation as waiting born out of hope or fear. While biblical hope is the "confident expectation, the sure certainty that what God has promised in His Word is true." (J. Hampton Keathley, III @bible.org) Both are future oriented. Both are an activity of waiting. But it is our perspective and our faith that brings about the difference. Hope requires more faith than expectation does, and hope is based on the promises of God. Therefore, hope is confident expectation - it is a certainty based on God's Word. 

Let me expand our other passage for the day to include a few of the verses before it and we will see this confident hope based on God's Word:

"Yet this I call to mind

and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord's great love we

are not consumed,

for his compassions never fail.

They are new every morning; 

great is your faithfulness.

I say to myself, "The Lord is my portion;

therefore I will wait for him."

The Lord is good to those whose hope

is in him;

it is good to wait quietly

for the salvation of the Lord."

lamentations 3:21-26

The author says, "Yet this I call to mind"; he is recalling God's Word and His character as described in His Word. In Exodus 34:6-7, the Lord Himself described His character to Moses, stating that He is compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness. It is because the author here in Lamentations can recall God's Word and depend on the promise of who He is, that he can say, "and therefore I have hope." His expectations of who God is and how circumstances in life will play out are based on the confident hope he has in who God says he in in His Word.

I have struggled most of my life with my own expectations - of myself and of others - often based on feelings and the defense mechanisms I developed out of disappointments and hurts from others. I would love to tell you that this mainly happened when I was young and before I became a Christ-follower. But the truth of the matter is that the defense mechanisms we develop when we are young will often pop back up in times of high stress or painful experiences later in life. Bible study, prayer and other spiritual practices have been the things that have helped me develop a defense against allowing unhealthy expectations to govern my outlook, and ultimately my hope. Much of this blog and my art journaling has been about my journey in recent years with losing hope due to not handling disappointment and loss well, and then regaining it through God's healing in using various spiritual practices, as well as art. So often when I think of the word expectation it has a negative impression for me. But we see in both of today's passages that for Isaiah and the anonymous author of Lamentations, their expectations are rooted in hope. May our journey through God's Word in this Advent season serve to build our faith and our hope.

"Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." Hebrews 11:1

My art journal pages for today:

Let me also recommend some Advent resources from other people I follow:

• Shelly Miller, who lead a group called the Sabbath Society, is writing about Advent on her site shellymillerwriter.com.
• Grace Table has a variety of writers contributing to their site. Visit gracetable,com.
• The background photo for the verse at the beginning of the post is by Aaron Burden, a youth pastor and photographer, I follow on Instagram and unsplash.com. Visit his blog and experience his incredible photography. aaronburden.com

The Advent Words 2017 prompts and Scripture reading calendar can be found in this post or in the Facebook group.

New Journal Themes

Last week on an Instagram post someone shared her artsy commonplace book and I remembered how much I loved this concept. A few years ago a friend got me connected to commonplacing, which is described as:

"Commonplacing is the act of selecting important phrases, lines, and/or passages from texts and writing them down; the commonplace book is the notebook in which a reader has collected quotations from works she or he has read. Commonplace books can also include comments and notes from the reader."  (From "Commonplaces: An Introduction" by John Hilgart and Van Hillard

Some other definitions:

• A book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.
• A notebook in which you enter memorabilia.
• The recording of words and ideas in a commonplace.

I have always done this practice, even before I knew it had a name. In my writing journals I tend to write down quotes and passages from books I am reading in order to take them in deeper and to come back to them again.

When I saw the Instagram post, and then went over to her blog, I got the itch to make an art journal just for commonplacing. Again, I already do this in my written journals, but I love the idea of combining the practice with art....cuz everything is better with a little art added, right? 

Here is the picture that caught my eye. Lovely, isn't it? You can see the rest of Brandi's commonplace book at brandikincaid.com

Now that I have completed the 100 Day Project, and I have 100 Rolodex cards in my holder, I'm kind of tired of working on the small scale that the cards offered. 

So, I spent this week thinking about what art project (um, projects) to do next. First I decided to take a binder I had that is kraft paper covered and already had a paint background on it. I don't even remember what I had originally made it for. Whatever it was I changed my mind and didn't use it. I covered the inside covers with some patterned paper and will use this for my commonplace art journal.

I haven't decided on a title for this book yet. My first page is the quote I used by Shelly Miller when I spoke at my church two weeks ago. This quote, along with a similar quote by my pastor, has become quite significant to me and I want to memorialize this part of my journey.

The other project I started this week is connected again to my speaking two weeks ago. (I wrote some about it in this post) For the past six months God has been doing some deep healing and transformation within me and the passage in Philippians I spoke out of has played a significant role. I want to have something tangible to serve as a reminder. So I transformed a Traveler's Notebook insert into a journal devoted to this. The practice of taking what God showed me in that passage and doing art journaling from it will also plant it deeper into my heart, mind and soul. Not only does art journaling give me a venue for using my creative muscles, it is also another tool in my therapeutic tool bag.  

I just don't seem to be able to work on one project at a time! 

Enjoy your weekend and make time to be creative! :)

A Little Art Journaling 2016

I am so glad I decided to participate in Ali Edward's One Little Word group this year. Over the years that I have selected a word to focus on I have gone up and down in my experience with it. Some years engaging in activities with my word has resulted in that word having a significant impact on my life. Other years have been lackluster and my interaction with my word has been sporadic, and thus the impact has not been great. This year I find I am fully engaged and experiencing change in my life as a result of it. Now, I'm not going to say that choosing a word changes one's life, like there's something magic in the process. But I will say that the process of focusing on a word that you then connect activities and introspection to help you set yourself up for improvement and change. This month our challenge was to create a vision board connected to our word and goals and to do this by cutting out words and phrases from magazines. This project started out slow for me. I started leafing through magazines and tearing out pages with words and phrases that spoke to me, but as my stack of pages grew things just didn't seem to connect with my intentions for the year. I pressed on and started adding background papers to my canvas and then images from magazines. Then I started cutting out the words and phrases and playing around with them. I cut out many more than I actually used and in the process I discovered that it was a part of the process. As I shuffled words and phrases around things just started falling into place and the result was a vision board that really seems to fit where I'm at right now and where I want to go. (I wrote some about my word and why I chose it here.)

The thing lately that has really been challenging me is getting out of my comfort zone and challenging myself to change habits and get healthy in different areas of my life. 

My favorite magazine is Art Journaling by Somerset Studios. I look forward every month to its arrival in my mailbox and I save every issue and comb through them again and again to gather inspiration. So when I received the new issue in the mail this week the only thing out of the ordinary was that its arrival was a little early. When I opened the plastic envelope, however, is when I got the surprise.

I've had the thrill and honor to be published in this magazine twice now, but both of those times I knew about it in advance. This time it was a total surprise! They have a feature in each issue called "The Written Word" where they highlight different ways artists use hand lettering on their art journal pages. It was in this section that they used one of my pages from a previous issue. It's so exciting seeing something I made in a magazine and something I never would have imagined would happen to me.

Around here the birds are starting to sing in the mornings. We see Robins and red-winged blackbirds...all signs that Spring is just around the corner. Spring is my favorite season. Everything is fresh and new and each day brings changes to the scenery. Happy first day of Spring!

Published!

I'm so excited!
                I can finally share a little news.

                               Because this came in the mail today....

And this was on page 8...

I was just so thrilled and honored to be asked to share one of my journals in one of my favorite magazines...again! 

There are four more pages to the article. I stalk the mail person every other month when this magazine is due. This time it was extra special tearing off the plastic wrapper and digging in. 

Thank you Stampington and Amber Demien! 

Happy New Year Odds & Ends

There's nothing more refreshing  than a week off with no agenda. I don't think I'm ready to get back into the swing of everyday life. But, it does begin tomorrow.

Friday I met my sister in Ann Arbor and we spent the day hanging out together and shopping. We poked around a few of our favorite shops such as Found (an awesome vintage shop) and Hollanders, a paper and bookbinding store. Then we went to an antique/thrift store and I found some great book finds. I got a huge U.S. Atlas book for $2.00! My Sis also brought me my dad's high school and college yearbooks that have been collecting dust (and mildew) in her basement. I'm going to take out the pages he is on and save them but use the rest of the books for art journal backgrounds.

We ate lunch near a Barnes & Noble bookstore so we popped in and look what I found on the newsstand a few days early!

It was very exciting seeing a magazine I am in on the newsstand. You can see it peeking out in the top row. I pulled this one out to purchase and photograph. My sister wanted to pull all of them out and spread them across the front row!

One of the bonuses I didn't anticipate from being published is an opportunity to build community with other artists. So far I have connected with two of the other artists in the magazine and love their work.

Kathy Zbrzezny

Mary Freeman

More Reverb 12 pages:

Day 10  side 1~ 10 things you were thankful for in 2012. 

Day 10 side 2

More art pages to come tomorrow. Happy New Year to everyone!

Organizing and Reverb Days 11 ~ 15

 Every so often I reach a point in my office/art room where it has become so disorganized that I can't focus on anything. So my hubby helped me start a project to reorganize over the holidays.

He hung the shelves. I'm organizing my stuff in the storage boxes. Now I can focus!

More finished pages in my Reverb 12 journal:

Day 11: Did you form any new, or strengthen any existing, relationships in  2012

Day 12: What was something you planned to do this year but didn't?

Day 13: What was your biggest indulgence in 2012?

Day 14: What was the best meal you enjoyed in 2012?

Day 15:What was a favorite photo you took in 2012?

It's great having the week off. I'm organizing and getting caught upon my art projects! Here's another peak at my magazine article coming up in January's Art Journaling Magazine:

Published!

I have been anxiously watching the mail for the past few weeks awaiting an arrival that would enable me to share some exciting news.

I have art and an article published in my favorite magazine, Art Journaling Magazine by Somerset Studio. I was so honored when I was asked to consider submitting some of my art. The magazine goes on sale on January 1st, but my advance copy came in the mail yesterday.

So excited!