"it's a lifestyle"

It's called art. Expressing creativity. Finding the beauty God has placed inside of you and giving little bits of it to the people around you.

I was talking with a dear friend quite some time ago about how, for us, creating isn’t a hobby. For us, living without a life overflowing with beauty and art is a miserable and abnormal way to live.

For us, art is a lifestyle.

That doesn’t mean we’re constantly painting or drawing or writing or photographing lovely things. Because we aren’t. She has a family to look after and I have work to keep me busy. But the beauty God has bestowed upon this earth is the food for our souls, so we find/create it wherever we can.

Sometimes it’s on the wall in front of her kitchen sink, encouraging sentences blooming from the tip of a permanent marker. Sometimes it’s in looking out my window and seeing the sun set from behind a small group of trees across the road. Sometimes it’s feeling a sudden rush of emotions and thoughts that results in scribbling a paragraph or two onto a spare piece of paper.

It’s telling someone, “I love you,” or, better yet, showing them. It’s dancing with your beloved in front of a coffee shop before he leaves for college. It’s listening to him tell you that God will pull you through, and then painting yourself a reminder. It’s breathing in beauty all day, every day, even when life doesn’t seem too pretty.

When I’m not creating, when I’m not actively searching for beauty, and especially when I’m not writing or painting or taking pictures, it means my relationship with God is at a low point. The same goes for the other way around. It’s because art really isn’t just a hobby for me. It’s a lifestyle.

It may sound strange, I know, but it’s a wonderful way of living. Between God and man, the amount of beauty we have in our day-to-day lives is overwhelming. It’s refreshing to look out my window and be so in love with what I see that I could just stare and stare and stare.

Now step back and imagine if we all could have this view on life. If every single person could wake up every morning with the same goal: making their little life beautiful. What would happen if we all treated each other with the grace and love of Christ—if we all added beauty to each other’s lives through art and love?

It’d be beautiful.

And I truly, truly believe that’s why God has put us on such an amazing earth. He’s graced us with creative minds and surrounded us with copious amounts of natural inspiration. So, let me ask you this: how can you not yearn to take what he’s placed inside of you and form it into something that can bind you to God and spark a fire in someone else?

How can we not see His purpose for us and love, create, and enjoy this beautiful, beautiful life?

Rebekah