This story started with someone who dared to do something brave. Something for himself but mostly something for Him because sometimes we need more than words to express our love, our devotion to the One who has given us life. When I hung the painting I could see it from the kitchen and it always made me smile because I remember the conversation (via text) we had about what verse to put on it. Read the account “here.”

Over and over again, my eye would travel back to that yellow in the corner, and somehow I knew I wanted to bring that out. I had seen a floating frame, one specifically used for framed canvases that I really loved. It made a canvas stand out, almost like 3D and I loved the depth of that. I wanted it. Elaine was getting nervous because she knows once I get something in her head, I never let it go. After a few visits to frame shops she said, “I will make it, how hard could it be?”

She had never made a frame before, but anyone who knows my best friend knows that not ever having done something only spurs her on to further action. She’s a problem solver, a fixer of the broken, a restorer. She is one who never likes to see anything wasted.

In the meantime, last weekend I decided to clean out my dressers. I emptied every drawer……I sifted, I cleaned, I vacuumed out. And it was then that I found it. An old painting my Dad had done when he decided to paint again after a long dry spell. I found it in one of his tablets on one of my visits back home. It had paint marks all along the side of it, like he was testing colors……brush strokes. I don’t even remember asking him if I could have it, I just took it. I was afraid he would throw it away.

The final painting, the one he deemed good enough, was presented to my Sister-in-law one Christmas, back before she went to Heaven.

It was only after I had lifted it out of the pile of papers, that I noticed. I took it over and held it next to the painting that Duane did. I gasped and called Elaine over. “Look,” I said excitedly, “The yellow he used, it’s the very same one!” How could that happen? That two artists, years and miles apart would use that same shade of yellow? But they did. And then I started to think that maybe God was at work here.

And when I called my Dad last night, he was depressed. But then I told him the whole story and I could hear him smile across the phone lines. “So you took my “mistake” and hung it on the wall?”

“Yes,” I said, “I did.” He paused thoughtfully and then said, “That’s just the kind of thing God does, but you must have your eyes open enough to see it.” What he saw as flawed, I saw as perfection, because he did it.

So now, on my wall I see more than art, more than paintings. I see friendship, and a father. I see love.

I see God bringing people together through what they create. I see something like the Trinity during Creation.

Now when I look at my wall, I see more than just art.

I see a person who refuses to say, “It can’t be done.”

I see another who tried something new and God blessed it.

I see another who overcame fear to resurrect a talent long after they thought it was dead and gone.

And I see someone who brought new life to something left in the scrap heap.

I see what God has done for each one of us………brought us all out of the reject pile and made us into something new.