Something to Ponder

For a few weeks in August five ladies from my church got together with me to make art and listen to my ideas about being creative, our faith and identity in Christ, and self-care. It was fun introducing some of these ladies to art journaling. It was also a good exercise for me and testing my teaching voice. I have taught on various topics for different events at church, mainly in regards to Bible Study or mission, and I have used my voice here on this blog. But I have had a nudge in my heart and spirit to explore using my voice in other ways regarding faith and art. What I discovered over these weeks is that I have way too much inside me and it really needs more time to develop into something cohesive. But this time with these ladies also sparked some different creative ideas which I will share here on my blog in the months ahead as well as through some other projects I am going to be a part of in the near future.

In prep for our last get together to talk about self-care, I read a passage that is very familiar to me, and probably to many of you, but this time reading it brought to mind some different questions. Let me share:

The passage: "Jesus replied, " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two verses." Matthew 22:37-40

Jesus had just been asked by one of the Pharisees in verse 36 which commandment is the greatest. The verse above give His answer. Not one, but two commandments are given as the greatest: loving God and loving your neighbor. Paul points to this last part, loving your neighbor, as a way of summing up all of the commandments in one (Romans 13:9) and as a way of fulfilling the entire Law (Galatians 5:14).

The part that brought about my questions was "Love your neighbor as yourself."

I think sometimes we view self-care as being selfish or self indulgent, but this verse makes an assumption: that you are already loving yourself in a manner that is healthy and good, and that out of that place you will love your neighbor/others in the same manner.To me loving yourself is about self-care. It's about taking care of yourself in ways that keep you healthy emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually so that you can be your best for others. Jesus modeled this when he withdrew and sought solitude, rest and time for prayer. He even did this at the expense of not serving others needs. He taught it and modeled it to His disciples. He was so in tune with His Father and the Father's will that he was able to discern when it was time for self-care and when it was time for caring for others.

So ponder these questions with me:

• How well are you doing at loving yourself?
• If you are not putting self-care/love practices into place that are healthy, then how well are you really loving others?
• Are you loving others out of something unhealthy? Such as co-dependency? Dysfunction? Facades? Trying to get your own needs met? Selfishness - to get something in return?
• Do you know yourself and your limits well enough to know how to fill your energy tank in the areas I listed above?
• Do you regularly take time to examine your emotional, spiritual, physical, and mental health?
• Do you regularly practice spiritual disciplines or habits that help shape you spiritually? Habits of rhythm such as rest, Sabbath, retreats that help energize you?
• Or are you spiritually thirsty? Worn out? Running on empty or burned out?

These are just some of the questions this passage brought about for me. 

For me, self-care is a way of loving myself that is healthy, not selfish. In fact, Cloud and Townsend in their book "Boundaries" call self-care stewardship of the gifts God has given us. The end goal of self-care is what determines whether it is selfishness or stewardship: Am I doing this to make me better for God and others or just to make me better. The answer definitely requires soul searching and listening to God in prayer.

I encourage you to make self-care a priority. Pray through the questions above. You may even want to use this as a topic to explore for art journaling! I do quite often!

Earlier this week I got a surprise in the mail. Elissa, who I know through the Documented Life Project sent me an envelope full of "Happy Mail". Thanks Elissa! Here's a small sampling of what was in the envelope.

Last weekend I spent some time painting papers for one of the exercises our group did. I noticed I  reach for The circle templates, stencils and stamps a lot!

And a recent non-Documented Life art journal page. 

My Sabbath Day and art are big parts of self-care for me. What practices are significant to your self-care?

A Winner, a Sneak Peak, and a Little Art Journaling

A week ago, in response to having won a stencil in a Stencil Girl giveaway, I decided to pass on the fun and do a giveaway from my Etsy shop. The winner of a vintage paper pack for making art is:

Brenda F. !

Brenda, please send me an email at marybrack@gmail.com and I will email you back with the information I need to personalize your goodies! 

Thank you to everyone who left comments and participated in the giveaway!

For quite a while I have had an idea for a class that combines exploring faith, identity and creativity ~ "Be Who You Are". It has been a bit of a struggle pulling all of my thoughts together into something cohesive and translatable to other people. So, I have pulled together a group of 6-7 ladies from my church and we are doing a trial run to enable me to get my thoughts and ideas out of my head and made into flesh, so to speak. We begin this Monday and will meet together for five weeks. At the end of this time I hope to have gained a better understanding of how all of my ideas and the paths God has led me on can fit together in a class format. Then, I hope to be able to put it together and offer an online class as well as develop it more for future use at my church. Below is a little sneak peak at the notebook I have been using as I have studied Scripture and tried to compile my thoughts and my art ideas.

Some recent art journaling ...mainly for The Documented Life project.

Week 30 challenge: do a smash book style page using receipts, etc.

I am off to help my in-laws move. We have Vacation Bible School this week. Looking forward to hanging out with the 4-6 year olds! It's my favorite age group and I'm excited that my little neighbor girls who are 5 year old twins will be joining me this week! I'll try to post some progress from the class next weekend.

May you enjoy your week and make white space for being creative and filling your soul!

New Year, New Chapter

I love the start of new things ~ new books, new art journals, new decorating projects, new adventures, a new journey, and right now, a new year. I found myself in the last few weeks of 2013 greatly anticipating the arrival of 2014. I am ready for the new-ness. I'm ready for a fresh start. I'm ready to put some old stuff away ~ things that have been weighing me down, things that have made me feel stuck, things that have been getting me down. It feels like the past few years have been heavy years and I'm tired. I'm weary. In some aspects I've lost heart and hope. I'm ready to move on; ready to be refreshed; ready to have my heart and my hope restored; to have my attitude and my energy renewed. At some point in the past few weeks I made a decision to simply choose to make 2014 a different year, a better year. I don't know how. I don't have it all figured out. But I am determined. I have decided that it's just time for things to change. I am realistic and practical, I know that it won't happen just like that, with a blink of an eye or the snap of my fingers. It will take time and will probably be a slow process, but every journey begins with taking the first step, and this decision to choose is my first step.

This year I am making it a goal to bring more people into my journey, into my struggles, into my joys, into my life in general. That has been part of my struggle over the past few years, I managed my pain and my trials by retreating. A few years ago I discovered that I am really more of an introvert than an extrovert. My extroversion was more a survival mechanism than a part of my wiring, and just possibly I swung too far into seclusion as I discovered my introverted tendencies. What will bringing people into my journey look like? Again I don't have it all figured out, but there are a few steps I plan on taking: 1.) I'm going to test a spiritual direction group with a few other ladies and, 2.) I'm going to explore the collaboration of art/creativity and spiritual practices by doing a group or class at church and on my blog. That's all I've figured out so far.

Some of the creative adventures I've decided to embark on in 2014:

• My word for 2014 is BE. Part of the change I want to see in the coming year has to do with both being myself and being very comfortable with that and with being my true self ~ the me who is shaped by her relationship with Christ. For me to "BE" means to live fully ~ fully dependent on God and fully living out of who I am. That means living more out of who I am than out of what I do. It's recognizing and believing that my "doing" flows out of my "being" and not the other way around. So in 2014 I want to focus more on being ~ being me. Once again this year I am participating in Ali Edwards One Little Word 2014 (OLW 2014) hoping that the prompts, challenges and structure will help me stay connected with my word through the year.
• I am participating in The Documented Life Project (Doc Life) led by one of my favorite artists, Roben-Marie Smith, and a few other ladies. It is a creative altered planner project that I am "altering" to fit me and what I want to do this year. So I am following the groups challenges and adding in highlights from my week as well as incorporating my OLW 2014 into the project. I have altered an old dictionary for my project journal rather than the Moleskein planner that many in the group are using.
• Another thing I wanted to try more of this year is collage so I am trying to make a collage a week and placing these in my Doc Life journal as well.
• I will also keep an art journal in addition to my Doc Life journal for everyday art journaling.

Well, I think that's enough for the start of my year. It will, of course, include a continuation of my exploration of contemplative spiritual practices and Bible study! Below are some pictures of the projects I've started:

My Doc Life project journal

monthly tabs

weekly calendar pages

Collage week 1 

OLW 2014

There are links to The Documented Life Project and One Little Word 2014 in the sidebar on the right.

What do you plan to do in 2014?

A Little Bit of This and A Little Bit of That

The slow, easy, laid back days of summer are quickly speeding up. In a matter of a few short weeks school will start and life will fill up fast. It will be good to see all the kids and teachers and school staff again, but I will miss the slower pace and relaxed feel of summer.
Quite by accident the other day, I made an art discovery. I was putting gesso on some book pages to prepare them for making art and I didn't like the thickness of the gesso on one of the pages. So, I took an ungessoed page and put it on top of the gessoed page to "lift" some of the gesso off. I loved the result! I ended up with pages that had a distressed feel to them.

Art play is so much fun! And therapeutic! It is a mystery how playing with paint and paper and pens and glue can rejuvenate me and restore my energy and my outlook. No complaints though, I'm just going to keep going with the flow and enjoy my time art journaling.

Journaling with Hope Wallace Karney in her Layers of Thoughts course:

Some of a distressed gessoed page made its way under the letters. :)

Week 1: Inspiration and Wonder

The picture is a flap page with writing hidden underneath.

Your True Self

I like true self/false self language. It is the language of spiritual transformation. It is the language of Jesus and of the apostle Paul:

"You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self (the false self), which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self (the true self), created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness." Ephesians 4:22--24 emphasis mine.

"...since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator." Colossians 3:9b-10

"We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may  live a new life.....For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin" Romans 6:4, 6

"If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" 2 Corinthians 5:17

"I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." Galatians 2:20

"Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.' Luke 9:23-24

The more we embrace who we are in Christ and live out of that, the more we become our true the self. The person we were created to be. The person God breathed into existence and formed in Christ. There is such a freedom in becoming this person, though the road is rough, we must go through death ~ death of our false self. Yet that false self feels so much like who we really are that it is often confused with "the real me". Each time I get a new pair of glasses with a new prescription I realize that I have not really been seeing clearly. I thought I was, but then that new set of lenses which makes what I see much clearer, reminds me that I had not been seeing as clear after-all. So it is with our false self. We think this is who we are, but then as we grow in Christ-likeness we begin to become the person we were really created by God to be. And the true self emerges and grows and we begin to see clearly that what we thought was real, was actually false. Our false self is made up of the lies we we believed about ourselves; it is made up of the person we thought we were supposed to be in order to be loved, to be liked, to be valued, to cope. It is made up of the coping mechanisms and defenses we created in order to survive. But all those things do not make up who we are in Christ. They do not make up who we are as a child of God, fully loved and valued for who we are ~ His beloved child. We are called in Scripture to live more and more out of our true self. Spiritual transformation comes as we yield to God and position ourselves in His presence to be changed. Positioning is experimenting with and finding those spiritual disciplines or practices which help us draw close to God and allow our hearts to be examined and reformed by Him. Art journaling as become one of those practices for me, along with Bible study, writing in my journal, reading, solitude, and connecting with kids and nature.

Well, this is not the post I had intended to write today, but it is the one that was revealed as I sat down and typed. It is the message that God drew out of me today.

A little more art:

Little Messages

The school year is done! It's always so busy in the last few weeks as we close another year in our ministry to Keyser School ~ we wrap up tutoring, we get ready for events like Bingo Math Night and Field Day. It's fast. It's furious. It's bittersweet as we say goodbye to kids and teachers for the summer, yet are ready for a change in pace...for a little while. I love slowing down in the summer. This summer I plan to take time to dig into the conference material from the When Leaders Lose Heart conference, read some of Terry Wardle's books, do some art journaling and look into the things that lie beneath this pattern of burn-out I regularly experience. I'm starting my summer journey next week with a two day personal retreat.

This quote from Terry Wardle seems to sum up well the journey that needs to take place to position myself for God's work of healing, restoration, and freedom.

"The journey forward to our true self in Christ is a journey backward to the woundings that created our false self."

So, one of my messages to myself this summer will be, "say yest to the journey". 

Our exercise for One Little Word 2013 in May was to listen to the voices around us that are repeated and document these little messages in our journal. For me, this exercise fit in well with books I've been reading and with what I heard at the conference.

In her instructions for this month's exercise Ali Edwards said about the messages we hear from life around us as well as that still small voice within us, "Have you ever noticed how sometimes it whispers and sometimes it shouts?" Well, the messages I've been hearing from friends, from books, from conferences, from God, have all been shouting. And repeating themselves!

My Little Messages:

From the conference/Terry Wardle:

• Say yes to the journey
• Focus on one area and build from there. (In other words, I don't have to tackle everything at once. Growth and healing will take place as I focus on one area and move on from there.)
• Hold fast to His promises (This message actually came to me out of the times of worship and music that started our days. The song "You Never Let Go" reminded me of how faithful God is.)

From books I'm reading:

• It's not about fixing, it's about letting go. (Ruth Haley Barton, Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership)
• Live into your true self. (So many books I've read lately have talked about our true and false selves.)

The rest have been a part of my life and are reminders to myself:

• Be who you are (based on the book of Ephesians and especially Eph. 4:1 to live out of your identity that is found in Christ.)
• Live with intention
• Be still. Relax. Breathe. (i.e. Slow down and focus!)

Restoration

Restoration. Transformation. Renewal. Renovation. It's all about change. Heart change. Soul change. Life change. It's a constant throughout life. The season right now is such a wonderful visual example of change. The gray, barren landscape changes each day as flowers bloom and leaves appear and the world becomes a green and colorful place once again. As difficult as it is at times, I actually like change. It's uncomfortable. It's a journey into the previously unknown. But passing years and a faithful God have shown time and time again that change generally brings about something better, something more authentic, something new and more colorful. Change often feels like winter ~ dark, cold, barren, but just around the corner is a fresh, new, colorful season. I'm art journaling as I go.

Recent Art Journaling Pages

This is the cover of another altered book journal. I made it this weekend after finding the book in a used book store. It's 7x7, which is a new size for me. 

I've actually been working on this spread for quite a while now. Every once in a while I add something to it. I'm not even sure it's done yet! Art journaling has become yet one more way I connect with God.

Collage

I have been so busy this past week with a leadership conference at our church and haven't had much time for art or for posting anything I did the previous week. Last week, while off work, I played with making some collage journal page backgrounds. It was fun to layer strips of paper that I would normally just throw away. I'm not sure what kind of art this would be called...kind of abstract. But I enjoyed playing with it and I like the results of the backgrounds.

I love this quote by Soren Kierkegaard!

This is still in the background stage.

No scraps will go un-used with this type of collage!

Set the World on Fire

I ran across a great quote that fits this journey of discovering who God created me to be:

"Be who you were created to be, and you will set the world on fire." 

~St. Catherine of Sienna

The more we look at how God has wired us ~our personality, natural talents and abilities, even the circumstances we have lived through since childhood that have served to shape us ~ the more we get in touch with all of this and learn how to live out of who we are, the more we will function out of our true self. I have come to see over the past few years that some circumstances from childhood have shaped me for the good and some not so good, but all of it has shaped me. For example, due to life circumstances as I grew up and then became an adult, I functioned as an extrovert. I spent 16 years in the hospitality industry and you just have to be outgoing. I do function more naturally as an extrovert when brainstorming. But in the past few years I have discovered that in order for me to really feel re-energized, I need solitude, and I need to work in times of being away from people throughout my week or I feel incredibly drained. As I have read more and more about introverts I find that I really resonate with their characteristics and find myself connecting with activities that energize and inspire introverts. Discovering this has helped me in my lifelong struggle with periods of burn-out. I'm learning to pace myself better and to build in time for those activities that give me energy and life. Self-discovery is valuable and healthy as long as it doesn't lead to navel gazing, but serves to help us be better at life and at serving God. Be who you are ~ become your true self, the "you" God created you to be. This is my journey. :)

BTW, in reading my post yesterday about the various paths of my journey that seem to be converging right now - my hubby pointed out that we, ironically, just purchase a new vehicle ~ a Dodge Journey!

I did an art journal page with the above quote and played with a number of art mediums: collage, lettering, some stamping, and I tried some doodling. I am very drawn to doodling but am not an artist in the sense that I can draw or paint objects. I'm not sure I like my doodling results, but it was fun to play ~ and that, after all, is a part of what art journaling is for me! A time to play, to re-energize, to put what's in my heart on paper in different ways.