One of the most empowering and life giving things anybody ever said to me was that there’s an emotional volatility that tends to go with the territory of being an artist, and it’s a crucible of creativity. That pierced me. It took what I had long seen as a burden to myself and everyone I happened to spill over and transformed it into something noble.
I’ve sat with that and prayed with it a lot over the last few years. How can our emotional volatility become a crucible of creativity? Even the most tortuous stuff can be a place of life when we let the Holy Spirit in to meet us there. Ashes into beauty, mourning into joy.
I was taking a tempestuous walk in the rain one day. I was feeling the storm, feeding off it and letting the walk be a place to let off my steam, and praying in the Spirit. And in the place I felt nothing but storm, the encounter with him in the midst of it did something to shift my heart. There was something captivatingly beautiful about the real stuff that was overwhelming me being a wave to ride in which to encounter love itself. There was music in it. In rooting in the beauty, the direction of my temper shifted; I had been passionately upset, and now I could passionately live in the beauty of him loving me precisely there. I had to keep doing extra laps around the cemetery where I was walking to simply enjoy the beauty of the storm around me.
I came back and painted this. I pondered letting the tempest be a force to ride, a time to tap into the Holy Spirit and make music from the passion already burning in my heart, and let beauty come of it.
Not long after, I heard this song which perfectly encapsulates what I’d been feeling, and it makes me cry nearly every time for how beautiful it is. “How can a man just keep walking around with his heart full of holes? But ohhh, his bow is on the string, and the tune resonates in the open space to show us how emptiness sings. Glory to God, glory to God. In fulness of wisdom, he writes my story into his song, my life for the glory of God.” – Christa Wells
