The History
How’s your prayer life? Mine is a series of highs and lows…restless, mind-wandering, focused attention in short bursts. I would classify myself as an “A.D.D. Pray-er. After years of guilt and boredom and saying “I should pray… and making vain attempts to set a side a time to pray daily.”….I find like Paul states in Romans; ” I don’t do the things I want to do and seem to do the things I don’t want to do. Most of my prayers seem to be daily, moment or flash prayers, as I go through my day…with maybe 5 min. focused prayer at bedtime. ( probably a result of years of childhood traditions of bedtime prayer…I’m conditioned to pray at that time.)
Then I had a encounter with an art therapy class…that reminded me to paint/play with color and image as I had done as a child. As a professional artist…I had stopped playing and just tried to work at creating paintings for product.
This radically changed the way I approached my painting and later I then started teaching Art from the Heart classes, using some of the principals I had learned in the Art therapy class and adding things that I had learned along the way from a spiritual perspective. In my Art form the Heart classes we learned to paint from spirit/soul, enjoying the freedom of the process instead of painting from the intellect which teaches us to paint for “Product” or a “pretty picture”.
BAM !!!! The lights came on……I had been doing the same thing in prayer. As an adult I was now praying for “product” not process. My prayer life had become work…praying from the mind with a list of rules of should’s I had lost the spontaneity of praying with the joy and freedom of a child. Even as I write this today I realize my flashes of prayer were more in line with that of a child but the voice of the Pharisee, critic and judge, had blinded me to this truth…free and spontaneous.
On my next “Post” , there will be more on Painted Prayer.
Painted Prayer....New Beginnings