The Artisan Soul (17 page)

At the conclusion of this miracle, John comments that what Jesus did in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs by which he revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him. Again, quite an unexpected result from such a seemingly insignificant miracle for God. It wasn't simply that Jesus turned water into wine that revealed his glory; it was that Jesus took ordinary water and turned it into exquisite wine that revealed who he really was.

Remember, art is an extension of self. Everything we create reveals who we are. The material that forms our souls is the only material we have available to us when we create. If the artisan paints with the soul, what are the colors available to us? Beavers create dams; bees create hives; ants create colonies; but humans create futures. The unique distinction of being created in the image of God is that what we create is informed by the invisible at the same time as it materializes the invisible.

When our souls are informed by human emotions that reflect the worst in us, we find ourselves creating a world that not even we ourselves would ever want to live in. When our inner world is filled with bitterness, unforgivingness, jealousy, envy, greed, and lust, then the darkness inside creates a dark world around us. But when the human spirit is shaped by the highest human virtues, such as love, kindness, goodness, joy, and gentleness, we create a beautiful world.

The greatest art is an intersection of contrasts. There is hope in the midst of pain, love in the midst of betrayal, courage in the midst of mystery. To turn our lives into masterpieces is to know both pain and healing, despair and hope, darkness and light. Our most powerful work comes when we reveal beauty in the midst of tragedy.

For all of us, part of this journey is learning how to turn the water into wine. What I love most about this particular miracle is that Jesus never had to tell them that a miracle had happened. It wasn't the spectacular nature of the transaction that indicated the divine intervention; it was the quality of the product.

This I have found to be the best metaphor for my own journey. The best description of my life is watching God time and time again turn water into wine.

We have no control over the status of our birth or the genetic configuration that makes someone a prodigy or a genius, but we all have the opportunity to step into life's circumstances and refuse to surrender to the mundane. We can bring meaning to every moment in every circumstance.

If we look at our lives and wonder why all God gave us was water, we can find solace in this: if we want to experience the wonder of turning it into wine, we have to start with water. The longer I live, the more grateful I am that I started with such low expectations about the life I would live and what I would accomplish. Even when it came to my journey of faith, the lack of expectation echoed in every room I entered. The first words I heard on the night I publicly surrendered my life to vocational ministry were my mother's, when she gave me a warm embrace, then looked me sadly in the eyes and said, “What in the world is God going to do with you?” Frankly, she only gave words to the question that was already rumbling inside my own head.

It's hard to escape the voices that let us know we are nothing but water, yet they become a point of celebration when we realize that God has special expertise in using common materials. If alchemy is the magical craft of turning common elements into precious materials, then God is certainly the alchemist of the human soul. His expertise is taking into his masterful care ordinary people who have lived broken lives, and turning our lives into nothing less than masterpieces.

Even this does not accurately describe the process. There has never been nor will there ever be a human being who could accurately be described as common material, regardless of how much evidence to the contrary our lives may have accumulated or how masterfully we've managed to make our lives as mundane and ordinary as humanly possible. This is not indicative of the material from which we come.

This year I came to know a man named Todd Younger. Todd was born in Delaware and is one of the brightest individuals I know, with a keen sense of humor. Todd was a typical toddler until the day of his sister's sixteenth birthday party, when he was left in his parents' bed to rest. Todd was later found unresponsive. Rescue CPR and emergency room hospitalization saved his life, but a reaction to two high doses of penicillin administered in the hospital rendered Todd a quadriplegic forced to spend every day until age seven in an iron lung.

The guilt and pain in his family destroyed their relationships. His mother developed crippling anxiety attacks, and his father compensated for his powerlessness to help Todd by becoming harsh and controlling and keeping everyone in a state of fear. As Todd matured, he was determined to become independent and successful. He moved from a school designed for people with severe disabilities to a public high school and later found work with Unocal and Pepsi. Although he was a quadriplegic continuously dependent on a tracheostomy tube to breathe, he nevertheless vowed never to be dependent on his family and to find a way to be self-reliant. When I asked him what motivated him, he replied, “Anger.” Anger kept him alive; anger kept him moving—anger at life, anger at the world, anger at God.

This is not the Todd I know. I met Todd when he began coming to Mosaic, our community in Los Angeles. I will never forget the day he called me aside and explained that he wanted to be baptized. This would be no small task. It actually posed a serious risk to his health, but he was determined to be immersed despite his paralysis and tracheostomy. He wanted his decision to follow Christ to be public and emphatic. When I asked him why, he was very clear: “There is someone in my life that I love, and they are bound by fear. Perhaps my commitment to do this will help them be free.”

Todd is a beautiful reminder that what seems like a great limitation from one vantage point can be, from a very different perspective, the material for our greatness. In that moment, all of us who had the privilege of being present were watching and experiencing a masterpiece. For us, Todd was our
Mona Lisa.

There has never been an ordinary human being born on this planet. But while there has never been an ordinary child born on this earth, the undeniable tragedy is that most of us die after having lived painfully ordinary lives. Every child is born with his own genius, her unique creativity. Every human being is brimming with divine potential. Every one of us is born with an artisan soul. It was Picasso who said, “Every child is born an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up.”

When you were born, you were no ordinary child, but perhaps like so many of us you traded your uniqueness for acceptance, your genius for security. For some reason, describing someone as an artist always suggests seeing them as irresponsible. The artist is the person who refuses to take responsibility; the artist chooses to never grow up; the artist is never the guy you want your daughter to marry, unless of course he's already extremely successful, but then it's not his artistry that has won you over but his entrepreneurship, or more bluntly, his success. We all understand that putting our children's finger paintings on the refrigerator and telling them their work is amazing is supposed to be a temporary phase and that eventually they will grow out of their need to create beautiful things and be celebrated for it.

Every child is an artist. Every human being is born with all the necessary tools with which to create a work of art. I don't know what you are like now, but I know you were born with curiosity, imagination, creativity, and courage. Human development is impossible without curiosity. It's what gets babies to push themselves up against the crib and strengthen their necks until they can finally turn themselves over to see the world around them. It was curiosity that got us moving; it was curiosity that forced us to find strength to make the turn; it was our incessant curiosity that motivated us to crawl but allowed us to overcome the fear of falling until we could walk; and it was our indomitable curiosity that caused us to run from our mothers' arms toward a freedom filled with mystery and danger.

Strangely enough, it was curiosity, we are told, that moved Moses to approach the presence of God. That childlike curiosity will get us every time. That curiosity fuels our imagination, our imagination fuels our dreams, our dreams fuel our souls, and our souls inform our lives. Whether we realize it or not, everything we do is an expression of either how alive our souls are or how much we have allowed ourselves to be deadened over time.

We teach children convergent thinking and discourage divergent thinking. Convergent thinking teaches us to follow a particular set of logical steps to arrive at the one correct solution. Divergent thinking focuses on the spontaneous, free-flowing release of creativity and imagination to explore unknown paths and discover unexpected solutions. Our entire educational system is built on convergent thinking. Education has been reduced to the organization and dispensing of data. We teach our children that to excel in this world you have to be able to fill in the blanks. The worldview we transfer to our children is that there is always only one right answer to every problem, and that answer has already been discovered by your teacher. If you are to succeed, you must excel at memorizing the facts that your teacher already knows, so that one day you may teach them to someone else. The irony is that to my best understanding up to 95 percent of children naturally gravitate to divergent thinking while only 5 percent move naturally to convergent thinking. You only have to be a parent to know that children are naturally imaginative and creative and that a huge part of parenting is teaching children to color within the lines.

It seems that quickly, at least by the age of twelve, this 95:5 ratio flips and remains a constant throughout our adulthood. In contrast to children, nine out of ten adults naturally move to convergent thinking. Only a small fraction remain mentally agile enough for our own childlike imagination and curiosity to inspire and activate divergent thinking processes. Ironically, most often the adult who is perceived as a divergent thinker is considered a genius or a creative, when really all they've done is to refuse to grow up. Or perhaps a more accurate description would be that they refused to relinquish the God-given attributes given to them at birth and applied them to the great problems faced by humanity. Concerning this, Einstein noted, “The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”

For years, we have resonated at Mosaic with a community of cultural influencers known as the Wedgwood Circle, which was founded by Mark Rodgers. This group sees the ultimate intention for humanity as expanding the good, the beautiful, and the true. It strikes me that my affection for these three arenas and for those who express them to their fullest capacity is related to my refusal to give up on childlike wonder.

I am amazed at how many people describe the fruition of their dreams as beginning in a childhood longing. There is a mysterious and beautiful relationship between the masterpiece our lives can become and the world we played in as children, where we lost ourselves in our imagination.

My friend Carrie Arcos was born in Albany, New York. She has been married for thirteen years to David Arcos, who is one of the most creative people I have ever had the privilege of working with. In many ways, they illustrate a contrast between recklessness and responsibility. David was always imagining and creating, while Carrie worked as an educator and invested her remaining energy in being a great wife and mother. Her hands were full, to say the very least, with three children between five and ten.

As long as I have known Carrie, she has had a dream of being a writer. Rarely have I met someone who knew more about literature. And while she dabbled in poetry and short stories, she never seemed quite willing to cross the line and risk a career as a novelist. Her first stab at a novel left her less than satisfied, from her own description. As she said, “I wrote a first novel and it was terrible.” But she continued, “That was okay, because I needed to write it to know that I could go the distance.”

Eventually she decided to write a story about her own personal journey and deep pain. Her second novel,
Out of Reach,
was inspired by her personal journey with her younger brother's addiction to methamphetamines. That she wrote it as a young adult novel is not surprising, as she spent many years as a high school teacher and always had a deep affection for her students. She spent much of her career as an educator searching for books with which her students could identify, books that could help them in some way with the real issues they confronted. Now this mother of three begins her forties with her book being a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the California Book Award, and a winner of several Best Children's Book of the Year awards. It shouldn't surprise anyone that she has now completed another book,
There Will Come a Time
. The masterpiece that is her life is the beautiful culmination of years of faithfulness, determination, and courage. That's how masterpieces are forged.

I see this reality all around me—men and women who refuse to stop growing, dreaming, and risking. In some ways, it's like a second childhood with all the benefits of the wisdom accumulated over time. You need both the wisdom and the wonder for your life to become a masterpiece.

Corrie Sullivan was born in Ireland, is madly in love with her husband Aaron, and is the mother of two girls. Her mother was a stay-at-home mom, her father a businessman who distributed arts and crafts materials as well as serving as a pastor. Though she attended college at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, she left university with a lack of confidence and diminished creativity. Ironically, her creative potential remained mostly dormant until she had children. “I have always been creative, and it wasn't until I had children that I realized that being creative was a necessity. After I had Sienna, I knew I couldn't just be ‘a stay-at-home mother.' I needed an outlet for my creativity. It bubbled up inside of me. It came naturally to me to combine my creative endeavors with motherhood.”