envision
On the day my sister-friend gave me the picture that sits, small and pretty in a driftwood frame, on my writing desk, she said, “I’ve painted a dream for you, a tiny writing cottage beside the sea.”
She does not know of the dozens of books I’ve begun and not finished, all of which begin in the fictional town where this cottage settles and creaks, warm and weathered by sea breezes. In that town, there’s also a little café that offers tender southern biscuits slathered in honey and strawberry jam for breakfast. You can walk right up to it from the beach. My friend does not know that her gift keeps calling me back to that town for a visit.
A whole story can unravel, see, from a single picture.
After I opened the package, loosening the satin ribbon with my fingers, I sat her picture here beside me and thought about the way God tells his stories, about His efficiency in creativity, how He always says more than even an artist intends.
In the Bible, this kind of thing happens all the time.
My friend has made the sky with barest hints of color; the steps of my little, red-roofed cottage, disappearing into the dunes. When I look at that picture, I can feel the warmth of the sand on the bottoms of my feet. The house has windows for all the light she knows I love, and a tiny clothesline on one side, upon which she has hung a beach towel and a bathing suit for me, a soft grey T-shirt she said was Kevin’s. I can feel that shirt up against my cheek, the slight salty stiffness left by the wind. I know exactly how it smells, faintly, of nectarines and soap. This is our place, Kevin’s and mine, a house called Hope, and if I pause long enough, I can hear the tiny seabirds she has drawn in, the ones that fly by in ‘v’ formation, the kind we like to count on summer days, lingering on the porch as windchimes serenade us. Far away, upon a hint of an ocean, my friend included a tiny shrimp boat coming home, as if to emphasize the break of a new day, and so also, hours of sweet possibility ahead of me.
On weary days, I sit here at my desk and smile at the way my friend has captured my heart, at the way, with ink and paint, she has manifested her heart for me, her experience of me, and her own kind and quiet presence, invisibly bent over the textured paper, her hand curled around a pen, a brush. Her friendship fills that frame, a hint, like the sea and sky, reminding me that I’m loved and known.
While I move my fingers across the keyboard on my computer and grab for windblown threads of thought, I sometimes imagine the way the floorboards of that cottage might feel beneath my feet, and drift deeper into creative spaces.
Like I said, when I read the Bible, this kind of thing happens all the time.
In the book of Revelation, God paints us a dream, not a vision, but vision bequeathed to an exiled apostle:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
This city, John’s city, God’s city, it’s the real basis for that fictional one I’ve written about, where my writing cottage and that shore-side café stand. Can you envision it? Maybe our ocean only hints at the vastness of God’s River.
We are meant to receive and keep John’s picture like a gift we unwrap, our fingers loosening the satin ribbon, lingering on crisp pages. We are meant to return to it, to gaze at it, finding it familiar somehow. We’re meant to hear it faintly calling us home.
John’s picture is like the one my friend gave me, a gift capturing the longing of my heart, but even more significantly, capturing God’s heart for me. His creative love fills the frame, His presence more than just a hint, because the words John uses refer to actual physical things, a real river, a real tree with real fruit, with solid edges and taste and touch and smell, real things which, when seen, compel spiritual results. Somewhere, just outside the frame, sits a home called Hope.
My favorite online lexicon says that the word John uses for seeing in the passage, when he says as a witness, I have heard and seen these things, suggests “carrying what is seen into the non-physical realm” so that a person can respond to it appropriately. In other words, what John saw was as real to him as touch, not merely a conjuring of his mind, and he wrote about it, carrying that vision in words into the non-physical realm, so that we could all respond to it. So, not exactly a dream he painted. More like a veil, like murky sheers upon the window, had been drawn aside for John, to reveal the true shape, the heft, the taste, of reality. In other words, the angel allowed John to see clearly with his own eyes what we can only experience now in dim reflection.
If my friend had painted for me the vision of an actual place that awaits me; if she had stood on that warm sand and watched the sea reeds bend; if she had watched those birds flap their way out over the water; if she had pretty much inscribed my name on the little mailbox beside the front door, her painting would be exactly like John’s words, a carrying of what is seen into the non-physical realm.
On my weariest days, I turn to this revelation of John’s in the morning, first, before I make it past my coffee or get up the stairs to my writing desk. It was a gift to an exile, and it’s a gift to a pilgrim like me.
Breath and bone hovering over the page, as I read, I can see the blinding crystal glint of that river, the river known to me as the river of God’s delights, or the fountain of living waters. I plunge my hand in, planting my palm on the page, lifting it up to watch the water shimmer, to imagine it dripping down my arm.
The river is God, and He is also both source and delta, the One who was, and is, and is to come. I am alive in the river already, and, as the living water wells up in me, I have become one with the river, too. I hear it rush around me, watch it move through the middle of the street of the city, carrying me closer to God, which has always been the pull of its current.
I gaze at that tree with its lush leaves, the one known to me as the tree of life, God’s tree, and feel the fruit of it heavy in my palm. I imagine the solid roughness of its bark beneath my fingers, see how the roots launch strong, meandering deep in every direction, listen as the healing leaves rustle when I take my harvest.
Undoubtedly, the juice of that fruit will drip down my chin, like the sweet, rich juice of a summer peach, the juice of this bite I’ve always wanted, even that first errant bite redeemed, every bite before leading only to this one. The skin of it feels warm on my lips, warm with the light of God, and I know the sweetness will be like nothing I’ve ever tasted before, better even than the taste of His goodness already exploding on my dulled tongue.
His kingdom is the tree, He is the tree, and I, planted by the streams of living water, have become one with the tree, too. Sometimes, He draws Himself like a vine and me a branch, Himself also as the gardener. He promises me those leaves that won’t wither and the bearing of much fruit.
Do you see? He is also the house called Hope. He is our place, Kevin’s and mine, also yours, if you like.
Here now, friend, you take the picture. Put it somewhere you can see, so that you can respond to it.
Maybe, let it draw you deeper into creative spaces. Let it remind you that you are loved. And by all means, let it call you home.
