Advent & Art & My Daddy’s Part

I want to share a personal portrait in the Advent & Art study today – a little glimpse behind the canvas of my life to fill in the paint by numbers of how my parents fostered my enjoyment of art.

My daddy worked with so diligently with his hands. My mama’s creativity decorated my childhood heart and home with gifts of beauty. You know how opposites attract and I promise, I won’t go through their whole story again; but, I will remind you of my 10th birthday gift to show how my parents worked in tandem. 

Mama stitched the most colorful and detailed Field of Flowers embroidery and my dad built the frame to showcase her work. 

If you were at my dad’s funeral, you know I spoke about the framework my dad provided for me. 

He taught me about corkscrew willows and how to tend flowers and such. Most of my lessons learned from him were out in nature.

In Daddy’s sunset years of living with us, we spent most of the time together indoors and as his health waned, I’d find myself wanting to get him outside where so many of our memories had been sketched. 

One time in particular, he was in the hospital and I just *had* to get him out of that room with all the beeping machines and reminders of how frail he truly was to a wide open canvas of blue skies and lapping water and rich soil. 

To this day, I don’t know how the hospital staff accommodated me and as I look back on these pictures from 2014, it looks like I took his whole bed trying to get him out of that hospital room – and honestly, I could have. I know I sure wanted to. 

I remember stopping at the wall of doors to the great outdoors and knowing in my heart that his days of putting another worm on my hook or mending a fence while I played on the haystack for the cows or him tinkering with the burgundy thunderbird as I ran past to play, were behind him. 

I turned that bed/chair of his around determined to find something for him to see besides lab coats and machines and tubes and wires that were working so hard where his body no longer could and rounded a corner on my mission to encounter this beautiful row of religious artwork in gilded frames. 

And for a few moments we escaped it all. 

Wide-eyed I wondered if we’d wandered onto the floor of an art gallery and left behind all the evidences of his failing health. 

The daddy who gave me the most wonderful framework for my young and impressionable years, he in this bed-like chair, and me in my I-want-to-get-him-outta-here attitude, for one last time, we enjoyed the art and creativity of a loving Father God as we marveled at this blessed interruption to reality. 

I have nine photographs from our outing that day and though they are not art quality, they capture an experience we enjoyed together and paint bright strokes in a dark patch, so to say.

I am so thankful for my parents and I’m so thankful they introduced me to art that was beyond my cornfield surroundings.  The books that lined mama’s bookshelves and the art book that was on the coffee table and biggest Bible I’d ever seen that was always open on the entryway credenza – gave visuals for my young, impressionable mind.

I lived among cornstalks; but my parents expanded my horizon to include art and I’m so very thankful.

Daddy is alive forever, amen, and as long as there is breath within me, I will give thanks for this artistic outing we happened upon together in a hospital.

Dad’s are gifts. 

Frames are extensions of art. 

I had a solid framework for my life. 

To daddy. 

To mama. 

To a family Bible with colorful paintings. 

To an art museum outing in an unsuspecting place. 

To The Lord who can paint a beautiful picture in my memories of a very trying time. 

To my current study of Advent & Art. 

I’m just a character in God’s great canvas, and I’m so thankful to Him, as I play my specific part.