Redemption...

OK so it has been awhile since I have "Blogged" and there are a lot of things I could blog about but I would like to talk with you about my art, and how it has changed me...

For those of you who did not know in the last few years I have begun to paint quite often...I began painting as a means of cheap Christmas gifts for my Mother and Sisters and it became something I enjoyed very much...and now is something that I am quite passionate about. When I moved to Houston to do Mission Year I wasn't sure how that would affect my painting but I knew it would do a great deal of work on me, and it did. I began (mostly to cut cost) painting on objects that I found on the side of the road. At first this was just an interesting and cheap way to put ideas down on "canvas" but it quickly took a turn as I realised what was occurring.
I was taking objects that people had thrown out, discarded, and found useless and I was bringing out their redemptive beauty. I was improving the quality of derelict objects that were other-wise cluttering up the street corners of our neighborhood. One day as I was trying to figure out what to paint on a piece of tile that I had found I realized that this is what Christ does...Jesus through his love looks at people, especially the derelict people of our society, and sees their redemptive beauty immediately...He does not have to search for it, he doesn't have to imagine it and create it because it is already there and he sees it clear as day...In Psalm 139 it says that God knew us in our mothers womb and that he knit us in before and behind...God has always known how beautiful of people we would be and has always seen us as such...
This thought began to represent itself in my art and through that began to bleed into the rest of my life especially in how I see people...I began to look at the wonderful children at the school I work at here in Houston's third ward and try to see the beauty that Christ sees in them no matter what they do...God sees a beauty in us because he created us and because we are his children and no matter how much we mess up or how hateful we are toward him he still sees us through that lens of Love.
My heart began to ache as I realized that other people do not realize this...Other people do not see these children as beautiful, they do not see my homeless friends as beautiful. I know they don't because if they did they would do something to help...If people truly saw the redemptive beauty that God grants each one of us then the sweet six year old girls I know don't have to wake up to mom and dad cooking crack in the kitchen instead of breakfast, if people saw the beauty then my friend who sits on the side of the road wouldn't be harassed out of her home by the department of transportation just because her home is under a bridge. If people saw the beauty that Christ sees then they would not be able to pay to have a teenage girl kid-napped off the streets of Houston and shipped off into the sex slave industry, Children wouldn't grow up in dangerous neighborhoods without a father, Men and Women wouldn't have to beg for food, and women would not have to sell their bodies to provide for their children...As I sit here weeping for the lovely people I have met and who will always be on my heart I understand that it is harsh of me to ask you to see them with the lens that God does but according to Dorothy Day "Love is a harsh and dreadful thing to ask, but it is the ONLY answer" GO d loves us not because of our societal standings, or how much money we have but because he created us...he created all of us. One person is not more important than another we are ALL God's children and we should act accordingly.

This is something that I believe in very much and I will now and forever do whatever I can to get people to view the hurting and the outcast with the same aching heart that God does because if we see that Beauty then the hurting stops....

Thank you and God Bless

Isaac Rice