My Mentor Hermit God

I would be lying to you if I told you that I was happy with God.  With everything that has happened I have been very angry.  But I was left with very few people to blame.  Besides him.

I am being brought up in a Christian Reformed home with strong ties to the church.  I would go every Sunday for as long as I could remember.  Christmas for me wasn't a day just for presents but for celebrating God's gift to us.  And never had I questioned my faith until my life was drastically changed. 

When I was smaller I pictured God as a big impressive man who wore a suit and dressed important. Someone who showed great authority, he was someone who naturally made you fear him. He was tall and handsome yet graying slightly.  When I thought about God, I thought of someone like the President or Prime Minister.  You would admire him from afar but be extremely fearful of speaking to.

When I discovered my love for art and painting and drawing, God was explained to me this way.  I was told that he was a great designer that he molded me and created everything we see in nature. It showed me the creative side of God. How everything was so intricate and different.  I understand how much he must have loved creating everything. The entire universe in a mere six days must have been quite the feat.   Suddenly He and I had something in common, suddenly God became much more real.  He and I both loved to create. Of course my creations are paintings or drawings or edited pictures and not me or the earth but it's still a similarity. And I was curious as to how God would paint my picture. So He and I became much more close.
But when my life changed it is like God was painting the scenery maybe planning a stunning sunset to represent the end of my life. Full of reds when something knocks his elbow and the sunset red becomes blood red all over my life, all over those I love and all over myself. 

My appreciation for his artwork plummeted.  How could an artist so careful and brilliant make such a mistake?  My mental image of him went from an impressive man in Paris painting beautiful pictures, to a Hermit attempting pictures but his addictions make him too shaky to paint anything really beautiful.   So I left him, I stopped admiring his work, I started to despise it.   I stopped trying to learn how to paint like him because I thought his paintings were awful.

Until one day. It is almost like he found where I was evading him, he had cleaned up a little. Not as impressive as before but a lot less hermit like.  Dressed in painters clothes he wants to show me a painting he is working on.   Reluctantly I followed just to please him. 

It was my old painting. The one I thought he ruined.  But in fact he made it beautiful, the red streak that I thought ruined the painting became the centerpiece.  It wasn't painted like before, not all perfectly symmetrical lines, and everything perfectly to scale, the painting now, more abstract.  Colors everywhere and just a faint outline of the perfect painting of before. 
He told me that it wasn't done yet. That the red splotch would slowly move out of the forefront of the painting.  He told me that there is a lot more work to do and that I could learn a lot from him, if I wanted.  I just smiled at him and picked up a paintbrush and watched him work my painting. Admiring once again.