Our community celebrated the resurrection Easter Sunday by a wonderful time of worship and painting.
I wanted to reflect on the Road to Emmaus that morning and Marty had passed me a wonderful idea that I just ran with. In the story, the Scriptures state “Their eyes were opened” when the travelers realize Christ was among them. This can be seen as very much a parallel to Adam and Eve’s eyes being open after eating the fruit. Except rather than opening their eyes to sin, evil, and death, with the resurrection their eyes became opened to life and hope and beauty.
As a community we reflected, painted and shared on what or eyes have been, or might be opened to, if the resurrection were true. Even the ‘older folks’ seemed to really enjoy the experience!
I had planned for people to simply take their tile home after the whole experience but no one wanted to separate their work from the whole. Maybe if we ever get a building we’ll tack it up somewhere permanently.
Though the cross is empty, it’s now filled with all our hopes and dreams… cause He is risen.
What if the whole earth was actually filled with the glory of God?
What if all of creation is groaning and hoping for even more beauty yet to be revealed?
What if since the beginning of time all creation has been screaming out that there is more to life than the visible?
* You can read a bit more on this from a previous post at the vox bookclub.
So I found some old unwanted tiles underneath the deck of my friends’ home, left discarded by the previous owner.
I brought them to our creativity and spirituality class and had each student choose a tile. They were extremely grimy so they were each asked to go wash them off. As they cleaned the dirt off of the tiles they were instructed to imagine themselves as the tile being cleansed by the hands of God.
Some tables were put together with a large blue camping tarp laid over it. This again was to stimulate a fresh environment that was also conducive to creative messiness. Dollar store paint and brushes were laid out.
Somewhat inspired by Steve Taylor’s “The out of bounds church“, everyone was asked to silently reflect, imagine, and paint as I read from Genesis 1, while Moby’s track “God moving over the face of the waters” was playing. mp3 of shortened version of God moving over the face of the waters
This is what we created when we put sixteen tiles together…
