BEAUTY FOR ASHES

Mixed Media Oil Painting 60”x48”

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Ever notice how easy it is to throw away someone before their story is finished?

After returning home from serving the Ukrainian refugees with a bleeding heart, I painted an abstract of the Ukrainian flag, mostly blue across the top and mostly yellow across the bottom in different textures. It was supposed to feel war torn.

I didn't like it.

For over a year it sat in the hallway outside my studio where people stored their trash. I couldn't bring myself to accept it. Yet for some reason, I couldn't bring myself to throw it away either. One day, more than a year later, I finally picked it up, determined to get rid of it. But as I turned the canvas upside down, something unexpected happened.

I saw it with new eyes.

I stopped focusing on everything I thought was ugly and started noticing beauty I had completely missed. Different parts of it took my breath away. The war in Ukraine was still raging, and suddenly I realized there was a Ukrainian woman's story hidden inside that broken abstract, just waiting for me to stop judging the state of her circumstances so I could finally see her.

The more I painted, the richer the symbolism became. Her world had been set on fire as it came crashing down into the flames and ashes of broken dreams. Peaceful blue skies gave way to smoke filled skies. Golden fields of sunflowers drowned beneath a tide of destruction she struggled to stay above. She carries the weight of her own cross until it feels too heavy to bear.

Then a new dawn begins to break.

She speaks His name. With His life in her, an army of angel wings lifts her, and she rises. The merciless bullet holes of war blossom into beloved sunflowers. Her traditional Ukrainian dress takes the shape of a hero's breastplate with a cape flowing behind her. One by one, her leopard spots melt away, becoming a legacy that trails behind her. Forged in the fire of her trials, her fallen world has become a luminous stained glass window through which the Son of God now shines.

Maybe that's why I couldn't throw the painting away.

It makes me wonder how many people we give up on—including ourselves—simply because we're looking at the wrong chapter. Sometimes all we can see are the ashes, the war, or the broken pieces.

God sees the masterpiece still becoming.

"...to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion... to give unto them beauty for ashes..." — Isaiah 61:3