Portraits

I just realized, after writing this whole entry, that I wrote a post with the very same song almost a year ago now - February 21st, 2006. I feel as if I've come so far since then... and yet, reading the post over again, it feels as though I'm right where I was before. All I can say is this - praise Him for His faithfulness, despite me.

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I don’t want to leave here
I don’t want to stay
It feels like pinching to me
Either way
And the places I long for the most are
The places where I’ve been
They are calling out to me
Like a long-lost friend…

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As a self-supposed connoisseur of all things vintage, I confess I am often completely mystified as I walk around your average antique store. (No, this hobby is not confined to Arizona’s winter snowbirds… although I do sadly confess myself on quite the younger spectrum of customers in said places! My generation doesn’t know what they’re missing.) It seems that so many things once commonplace and hum-drum are suddenly beatified by age. It’s as if the yellow haze on an old portrait somehow makes the face softer; the nose less pointed; the eyes kinder; the features almost familiar, like an old friend.

And yet I have also noticed, as I walk about these places, that it’s not only the yellow haze that adds such beauty. In fact – more often than not – a fair amount of deceit is (unbeknownst to the customer!) incorporated in old works of art. Long before the now universal camera, photography was carried out in portrait-painting. Paint and canvas were the instruments conveying faces and figures to posterity, and the mind behind paint and canvas was often well paid to be inaccurate. I remember reading – with a good deal of both amusement and disdain – that many portrayals of well-known faces were glorified and magnified beyond even recognition.

Sometimes I paint portraits with my life, too. Portraits of places I’ve been; things I once knew. My instruments are not paint and canvas… I use words.

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It’s not about losing faith
It’s not about trust
It’s all about comfortable
When you move so much…
And the place I was wasn’t perfect
But I had found a way to live
And it wasn’t milk or honey, but then…
Neither is this.

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Every house I’ve ever lived in – and I’ve lived in a few – is imbued with certain timeless memories. I remember the old trailer in Ensenada for the beautiful cliff 100 yards away looking out on the sea. I remember my last home in Hermosillo, Mexico for its many rooms – ideally built for excellent rounds of hide and seek – and my last big birthday there. I remember North Carolina for the rolling green hills, the forest right outside my apartment door, and the wild onions Amy and I would gather by the dozen. Each of them – despite their many faults – are immortalized in my mind. So what if “home” was nothing but a freezing 4-foot-wide trailer without any heat? So what if the sewer underneath the house exploded? It was home.

And lately – as I began to face the future in real earnest, as people begin to ask me where exactly I’m headed – my heart begins to fear. If there’s anything I hate to say in this world, it’s this…

I don’t know.
And lately, I feel that I don’t know much.

I suppose it’s a healthy place to be, but that doesn’t make it any easier!

I like to hold on to the past; I like to feel founded. Who doesn’t? And so many times, in this painful process of sanctification, I reach for what’s comfortable instead of what’s true. I long for what was once home to me – because I’m afraid to trust Him now.

Numbers 11:4 The rabble with them began to crave other food, and again the Israelites started wailing and said, “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost – also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic…

Apparently they remembered little else. (!) They don’t remember slavery, they don’t remember the murdering of their children, they don’t remember famine and hunger and deprivation and strife. They’ve forgotten the miracles that brought a country to its knees and brought them out of danger. They’ve forgotten that moment when the Red Sea was parted and they walked through its bed to dry land.

All they can see ahead is fog.

As fallen human beings – un-sovereign and un-omniscient as we are – we often do just this.

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The past is so tangible
I know it by heart
Familiar things are never easy
To discard…
And I was dying for some freedom
But now I hesitate to go…
I am caught between the promise
And the things I know

I’ve been painting pictures of Egypt
Leaving out what it lacks
The future feels so hard
And I want to go back
But the places that used to fit me
Cannot hold the things I’ve learned…

And those roads were closed off to me
While my back was turned.

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I’ve learned a few things about myself lately. First of all, I’m stubborn. Second of all – even when I think so – I don’t really want what’s best for me. Not really. Because if I did, I would want His will for my life… not mine. Or, better put, my will would be in line with His. And I spent a whole year “waiting”… waiting for God to do something, waiting for God to move. As soon as He does – as soon as He breaks down my pride and allows me to see Him more clearly – I run backwards, away from this painful process of growing. I run back to my memories; to my portraits; to the little earthly anchors that I, in my human short-sightedness, once thought held me secure.

Having realized my error, what should I do now?

The answer, at first, was mystifying to me: remember. Then I realized I was focusing on my own face in the portrait - rather than the glorious Painter Himself, whose brilliant colors and fine artistry far surpass my meager attempts at portrayal. I must remember HIM in all this! I must remember the times He has been faithful when I was faithless. I must remember His promises – to never leave us; to never forsake us; to bring us into the glorious country we will one day share with Him.


I have a new focus; a new hope.

There is a reason why Paul, in Hebrews 12, tells us to run ahead with perseverance the race marked out for us. We are not home yet. We see in Hebrews 11, right smack in the middle of the hall of fame of faith, these incredible verses.

v.13 All of these were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country – a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.

Oh boy! Now that’s awesome, in every real sense of the word.

Heb 11:1 Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

Rom. 8:23 … we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

2 Cor.4:16-18… Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

I pray, as I end, that these memories, these portraits of the past may be used in my life as tokens of my God’s faithfulness; that I might remember Him. I pray, that as I look toward the future, my will might be entirely enveloped in His – my eyes fixed, my focus set, my heart willing, my feet running. Running ahead.

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Heb 10:35

So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised.
For in just a very little while,
“He who is coming will come and will not delay.
But my righteous one will live by faith.
And if he shrinks back,
I will not be pleased with him.”

But we are not of those that shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who believe and are saved.

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-Song excerpts from Sara Groves