Years ago, I took a life drawing class, in which I learned the fundamental principles of drawing with charcoal on paper. My teacher taught us to create realistic expressions of ordinary objects – a coffee cup, an apple, an egg, a banana. To this day, I am amazed at the lifelike renditions I produced. I enjoyed this process for a while but discovered a strange response to it. The more I learned to draw with precision and exactness, the more constraint I felt. There was a great pressure to “stay in the lines”. That same year I took up watercolor painting. That solved the problem.
Using watercolors requires an understanding that colors flow in the water – sometimes unexpectedly. Because I was a beginner, every opportunity to put a wet brush to paper was an experiment. The water and colors moved and transformed into unanticipated shapes and hues. Skies flowed into treetops. Fields wanted to be ponds. Lifelike objects had soft, fluid boundaries that made them ethereal and weightless. All sense of control that may have been a constraint in drawing was lost in the creative flow of watercolor painting. When I tried to control the water, my paintings became static. When I painted with the movement of the water, a clear freedom and spontaneity emerged on the paper. But it was hard, and it was frustrating. Nothing looked as I had planned.
I tell you all this because this summer I found myself using the word “flow” for the way I wanted God to work in my life – the way I believe God wants to work in my life. When I think of life in the Spirit, it is right to think of movement outside of control. Think of all the ways the Spirit is described in the Bible–streams of water flowing, oil dripping down, wine pouring over, wind rushing through. There is a sense of movement and abundance and blessing, but certainly not control. Not on our part anyway.
So, I really did not realize what I was asking, when I asked the Lord to flow more freely in my life. What I meant was creativity, beauty, spontaneity and freedom. All to which I believe God says “Yes”. A resounding “Yes”. What I get is life outside the lines, outside the boundaries that may have been drawn for me, by myself or others. Lines become blurred, definitions change and merge. I admit to you, this can be unsettling. We want to be creative people, but creativity has to allow for unexpected outcomes. Creativity has to expect a beauty yet unseen. Creativity has to wait in a process that begins as a murky puddle. It is hard not to know how the painting will turn out. It is hard not to crumble up the paper and go back to coloring inside the lines someone else drew. May I just say this; to ask for the flow of God’s Spirit is to ask for an increase in faith. We are living on the edge of the unknown.
I think Nicodemus was thinking along these lines when he visited with Jesus, one night. Maybe it was a hot, sultry summer night when the air was stagnant, and life in his spirit seemed rigid and flat. Perhaps out of boredom, or malaise, he initiated this conversation with Jesus, desperate for a breath of creativity to cool his perspiring brow. Nicodemus said to Jesus, “How can man be born when he is old?” Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So, it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:4-8) Life in the Spirit – like water, like wind that does what it wants to do. We don’t really know what Nicodemus chose to do at that point. Maybe he walked away perplexed, challenged, and confused. But he did show up later, to anoint Jesus’ body for burial, no doubt a movement of the Spirit taking him somewhere he could not know for certain. (John 19:39)
Some people say living in the flow of the Spirit is like getting in a river and letting it take you where it is headed. It is a life of surrender. A life let go. It takes faith to let go. But think of the beauty seen above as we tilt our weary heads into the cool waters, feeling ourselves weightless in their current, freeing us from the constraints that bind us to one plot, one way, one plan. If we ever wanted something new to happen to us, to be “born again” even when we are old as Nicodemus said, we are going to have to get in the flow.
Jesus never said anything about watercolor painting. But I feel pretty certain he was the most creative person to ever live, with a deep appreciation and understanding of beauty, freedom, abundance, movement, newness and life. I believe he invites us into a life like this. Though my first attempts to go with the flow are muddled and challenging, I persist. Though I am afraid to make a mess, I believe in the beauty to come. I show up for the Teacher to teach me a new way. I call this new way faith.