Making a Masterpiece of Me

Creation is all around right now. 

The gentle whirring of machines sewing. 
The weaving of tales.
The releasing of books.
The kneading of bread.
The splashing of paint on canvas.
The carving deep into soft wood.
The pushing of tender shoots through soil. 
The click, click, clicking of the shutter. 

And yet, my hands can't seem to get here to my small space to tap away my words.   The creative world spins, and I am not allowed on board as my life twirls to a unique rhythm. 

I wonder why I can't get at my creating.  And Sunday's sermon does a little gentle tapping in my thoughts:  "The Object of Worship-the Lord Our Creator and Re-Creator."

I seem to fancy myself a creator of sorts. A weaver of the intermingling of life and words and, I hope, some Truth.  But, as I gaze back across these two weeks, I come into focus a bit more, not as the creator but the created. 

My Re-Creator has been hard at work in making a new canvas of me, and he means to make a masterpiece.  He set out clearing away the old junk that resembles a velvet Elvis in a gallery of high art and replacing the faded colors with a fresh pallate and medium, a new heart on which His life, His desires are splashed across every inch of taut fabric.

The breaking of the old frame and stretching tight the clean fabric across expanded, healed joints isn't comfortable, but, oh, how I have longed for the change and have echoed the cries of Po in Kung Fu Panda, "How are you gonna make me NOT me?"

How would He choose to make a masterpiece of my low end, cheap imitation of His holiness?

Not through books or blogs or some comfortable armchair way.  Not even through some high and lofty exhibition of great sacrifice.  But through the discipline of service in the small things.  The uncomfortable things.  The simple things.  The smaller daily constant sacrifices, little deaths to self as the creator.  The things we most avoid because they kill the flesh that fights tooth and nail to survive another day. 

But I am learning that the promise of resurrection is hidden within the death.  That while I see all that isn't, He sees all that is, all He is making of me.  A masterpiece.