The Day I Was Set Free

I always loved Mrs. Guilbert. She was a perfect fit for an art teacher- fun, creative and a bit eccentric. I attended a small private school and art classes took place in an old school house. It had windows on every side that filled the house with natural light and below them were shelves packed full of every imaginable art supply. The floors were worn and the creaky wooden floorboards were drafty especially in the winter months, but as old as it might have been, I loved that building and I loved art. 

It has taken me 32 years to realize why, but now I know, it's because Mrs. Guilbert let me be myself. 

Now she tried for some time to encourage me to sketch the bowl of fruit or replicate the painting of the vase of flowers. But it didn't take long to realize the perfectionist in me was not made to recreate someone else's work. It would never be "just right." I would literally throw away dozens of drawings because I would have shaded a pear wrong or because the shade of pink didn't match the example exactly. Before she could stop me I would have wadded up another piece of paper and she would exclaim, "BETHANY! What was wrong with that one???" The rest would have finished a particular assignment a week, perhaps two weeks before but it would still be sitting out... just for me. Until one day Mrs. Guilbert gave the class an assignment then looked at me and said, "Bethany, go make something." 

My eyes lit up. 

"Wait, what? What do you want me to make?"

"Whatever you'd like. Just show me when you are done."

I was elated. And no one in the class seemed to mind. I was always slowing them down anyway. 

I knew very young where my strengths lied and they weren't in anything that involved the swipe of a brush or the shade from a pencil. Even after years of art lessons, I was terrible. But here I had creative freedom. I would form clay, layer tissue paper to create stain glass or find the most random objects to a grand sculpture. My pièce de rèsistance was a life-size girl made of chicken wire, papier-mâché, paint, yarn and cloth. The perfectionist in me looks back to just how silly she truly was, but the young child in me was amazed at what I accomplished when I was set free. 

The world wants to tell us that to be successful, we have to do things a certain way. We have to follow a specific set of steps and these should not be deviated from. But God didn't create us to fit in tiny boxes of traditional human constructs. Life is unique and crazy and sometimes messy and He wants us to throw caution to the wind and walk step by step in line with Him. It doesn't have to make sense to anyone else. It's not their life. The only one we answer to is God, and we will one day answer for how we choose to respond to His calling. Let's not miss ours because it doesn't look the way we thought it would. Let's walk as those who have been set free and accomplish the plans He has put before us through whatever creative and imaginative ways necessary.

"Who the Son has set free is free indeed." - John 8:36