Serene in the Still

If you’ve followed my work over the last few years it’s easy to see the major mile markers of my life. Angst filled works of screaming and yelling morphed into a focus on human forms and elegant perspectives of figures in motion. Then there was a period of obsession with trying to understand emptiness and searching for peace through meditation. And then there was my restoration through salvation followed by a peace I have somehow never known — the one which “surpasses all understanding” — the one that has led me to right here, right now.

Things are better now. They’re not perfect, of course. In fact, a lot of the time, I admit, they’re not great. But I feel better at least. I am less worried about stuff and status. Comfortable (mostly) with my lot in life. I’m reminded daily that I’m a child of God, and that’s enough. I’m trying my hardest to not live for this world. This world is broken, sick. Focus is on the next.

In taking inventory of all of this, I find it interesting how transcendental meditation, the kind I have been trying to practice off and on for the last ten years or so — the very kind that asks me to empty my mind and push aside thoughts as they arise — was the very mechanism of frequent irritation that eventually led me inside a church. All these years I’ve been trying to empty my mind to find peace and stillness. Frustration was usually the result. I just couldn’t empty my mind, hard as I tried. After much struggle, I found out all along what I really needed most was to fill my mind with the fruits of Jesus Christ.

Wow.

That one little tweak has helped me immensely. It is there, full of scripture, in the absolute stillness of each and every morning, where I feel the most calm, the most love, the most peace.

And, of course, the most hope.

Amen.