“Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” Psalm 37:4
I envy visual artists. There seems to be a freedom in a blank canvas, like they could sit down at the desk and ask the thing they’re making what it would like to be. As “re-creatives” we oboists walk the tight-rope of re-creating a piece of art that someone else made, delicately adding our own signature (needing a perfectly scraped reed to do so.) Visual artists seem so free; sitting down with the paints, letting the art speak through the creation about what it will become.
I write from New York City. Yesterday I was at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and I ran into one of my favorite paintings, Picasso’s “Girl in the Mirror,” about which the placard at the museum says: “This painting is an exploration of the transience of beauty.” (That’s not what I think the painting is about, but that’s another blog.) I love this painting because of what it seems to say about how others see us, and how we see ourselves. Its colors and exuberant patterns seem to suggest that Picasso found the woman beautiful, but that’s sort of secondary to what I see in the image. Here we are viewing her viewing herself, or really viewing Picasso viewing her, viewing herself. It got me thinking about how we see ourselves, how I’ve seen myself lately, especially in the reflection of this, my favorite city.
People have often told me I seem like such a confident person. They don’t know I struggle with fear and insecurities just like everyone else. One example: I never applied to Juilliard until my Doctorate because I didn’t know if my ego could handle the rejection. I only applied after my Masters because of a religious experience that happened while I was considering the idea. I had haphazardly stumbled into a church after many years away, and that first day back in worship, I had heard God telling me to apply to Juilliard. (Not an actual voice, but an internal knowing.) And so when I was admitted to the program, I saw that as confirmation: God wanted me to live my dream of being in New York City, and God had made the way for that to happen. But, as you may have read in some of my other blogs, it didn’t go exactly as I had hoped it would. The degree program was difficult, my aforementioned ego and pride made it difficult for me to receive feedback from an intense teacher. I felt discouraged, burned-out, and lost. Not only that, I applied for job after job in the city and absolutely nothing panned out. The relationship I had spent years cultivating with someone I had thought I would marry, fell apart. I was left with no prospects, no money, no job, no apartment. I had to leave NYC. As easy as God had made a way for me to be there, it seemed God had closed the door.
I fell into a spiral of shame. I wondered if God was punishing me. No amount of new accomplishments or opportunities took away these feelings of intense failure. I couldn’t even look at my diploma for years afterward. That lyric from ”New York, New York” of Frank Sinatra fame, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere,” haunted me. It took so much time and patience to unravel those years, and it was hard to visit NYC for sometime because of it. Being here this week, seeing the ”Girl in the Mirror” at the MoMA, seeing my own image in the shop windows with gray hairs, baby weight, and all—I look different now, because I am deciding to see myself differently.
When we see each adversity as a chance to direct us along our unique path, then there is no such thing as failure. We are either becoming more of who we are meant to be or less. Leaving New York City was what I needed, in the end. Had I stayed, I would have continued along a path believing that if I just worked hard enough and put myself in the path of the right people, then all the desires of my heart would be mine. Or worse: New York City would help me keep pretending that I had worth simply because I lived here and was around other people of "worth." It was through leaving that I realized that my worth doesn't come from any of those things. The verse above that King David penned in Psalm 37 doesn’t say, “Work hard and God will give you the desires of your heart.” Instead it says: “Delight yourself in the Lord…”
It might seem frivolous or simplistic, to say that to get what you want in life, simply find pleasure in God. But for me, delighting in the Lord means believing that God holds the key to my direction. It means believing deep down with all my being that God is good: not a miserly judge just waiting for me to fail, not a strict teacher who doesn’t approve. Delighting in the Lord doesn’t mean being brainwashed and forgetting about all the things that matter to me personally; it means seeing all that matters to me, as God sees it. When we delight in the Lord, our truest desires—all that we would wish for if we knew what God knows—become ours.
I probably don’t need to tell you how much I love my life in Wilmington. It goes without saying that if I’d never left New York, I would have never met Edwin nor had Eva; I would have never been able to realize my passion for working with artists who are feeling lost and lonely like I felt in New York. I wouldn’t eat Guatemalan tamales at Christmas and have a mother-in-law who treats me like her own daughter. Do I wish we could have skipped over the pain and sadness of letting go of all I thought my life would be? Sure. But I much prefer this life, this woman, than who I had imagined I’d become, mostly because she is real. This life resonates with my soul so deeply, I believe I am right where I am supposed to be. And New York is still right where I left it, full of life, friends, and good art. Visiting can make my heart full, as I choose to see my time there as an amazing gift leading me to all the blessings of now.
If you’re inside your own “failure,” rest in the knowledge that one day, when the dust has settled and you’ve grieved your loss, things will look different. I believe they can look better if we choose to see them that way because the mastermind behind this whole operation--the one who is worthy of our trust-- is truly good. There is pain in being vulnerable and going after the desires of your heart, but that pain does not defeat us when we delight in all that God has already done and will continue to do on our behalf. There is no such thing as failure when it comes to becoming more of who you were intended to be. As my mother-in-law always says, “if something is for you, it will be given to you.”
In Picasso’s painting, the face of the woman has two sides; one with creamy lilac skin without a blemish, and the other is marked and clown-like. We all curate our lives to show our good side; we cover our shame with make-up and manufactured confidence, but God sees all that we really are and loves us anyway. God can take our greatest shame, our greatest blemish, and turn it into something beautiful and useful.
Unlike the girl in the painting, we get to decide how we see ourselves. We can reframe our imperfections, our failures, even our beauty, and take away the power of others to provide us with the reflection, a verdict of whether or not we made it. When we delight in the Lord, we take the mirror off ourselves and put it on God.
And just like a good visual artist, God sits down at the canvas of each of us and doesn’t just blindly plan for us to be a carbon-copy of everyone else, nor leave us to the whims of how we feel about ourselves on any given day. Instead, the Artist collaborates with the artwork, accommodating our unique personalities, as we each become reflections of God's light. The Artist gives us the desires of our hearts that have been placed there from the beginning of creation, to live out, as this great painting of our life appears before our eyes. Isn’t that delightful?