Looking toward the coming year

During the Christmas holidays we took a trip to Atlanta where some family lives in order to gather and celebrate.  While I was there I became all the more aware of the reality of what my Aunt Carla goes through on a daily basis.  Aunt Carla is struggling with cancer, diagnosed 5 years ago.  She is a mother of 5 and like the rest of us christians is having to fight off the devil and all his wiles.  You see she was told when she became sick with this cancer that she would live through it.  That was her word from God, but through various visits to doctors, different treatments, several complications that have mounded upon her during this struggle she has even started to have trouble believing the TRUTH she was once told.  She has become discouraged as we all do at times if we are trying to follow in the truth of Gods word.  So I began to ask God on the way home if there was a way that I could help to encourage her in any way or to help to restore hope, or if there might be some way for me to walk this with her, to help carry the burden with her. I feel like something that God spoke to my heart is to take what God has given me and walk with it daily, that being painting.
 So therefore, I am going to attempt to paint one painting a day for the next 365 days.  This won't be near the experience that my aunt Carla has went through, but the thing is since I have started painting I have went up and down rollercoasters, been pulled in every way away from God and this ability to paint.  I have had doubts in myself, my artwork, God himself and everything around me.  I feel like when God lays something on us whether it is seen as a blessing such as painting or a curse such as cancer, we have the ability to turn either of them around.  My ability to paint at times has felt like a curse because some days I feel like if I haven't been in my word and my blank canvas is still sitting after days or weeks without the first stroke on it, it seems as if I'm forsaking something that God has placed in my heart.  I hope that makes sense.  How could cancer be a blessing you might ask?  Because if God really did place the word "life" in Aunt Carla's heart, even past all of death spoken by doctors and thought by others, if she believes that through to the END of this cancer and lives to tell of how Jesus was with her through it, then who gets the Glory? GOD.  Isn't he the restorer of hope? So maybe God is using Aunt Carla to restore hope in God to someone around her, or just herself.  I don't know, I don't know what God has in mind, but what I do know is that if we walk out whatever He has spoke into our hearts that there is Glory for Him in it when it is all said and done.

So if you will when you think of this story or aunt carla or me please say a prayer that strength will be there when needed, perseverance will do it's work, and that God's will be done in the lives of all involved.  Start checking back as you think of it because I will try to post each painting every day as soon as I finish them.   Thanks for reading and God bless you and be with you!