Saturday, August 8, 2015

Choose Your Lens


August brings with it a new theme for the Take Me Deeper devotions at His Kingdom Come. Our theme this month is about gratitude. This month we want to dig in a little deeper and look at being thankful as a way to focus on God and change our perspective on life and circumstances. The theme this month is very personal to me because it is the journey God has had me on for the past few years. God has used gratitude and focusing on His blessings in my life as a way to pull me up out of burn-out. He has given me opportunities to choose to change the lens I look at life through: I can either let circumstances dictate how I view God or I can choose to look at life through God's lens - through prayer and dependence on Him. Our devotions this month are going to focus on the impact that thanksgiving and gratitude can have on how we view life and circumstances. Philippians 4:4-9 will serve as our guide on how our view of life's circumstances can be turned around and lead to joy and peace in the Lord. Join us! Take Me Deeper is a weekly devotion and faithart group.Joining is free at his-kingdom-come.com

I was inspired by Kathy Shaull, one of the HKC ambassadors, who has been doing a theme each month for her devotion inspired art pages. I made two sets of background pages so that there would be a theme running through my devotion pages,





The set with the circles was done by painting onto my 4:inch circle Gelli plate. I liked the texture the brush strokes made when I stamped onto the background page. The second set of pages were made using book and magazine pages with pieces of painted and gessoed paper scraps. I chose this second set for my August pages and will use the other set in a future month. And here is my first page for the month:

I didn't use a verse from the Philippians passage on my page but this verse from 1 Thessalonians really sums up well the choice to view life through God's lens - rejoice, pray, give thanks in all circumstances.

May you choose to see God's blessings in your life this week and make time to make art!

3 comments:

  1. AWESOME!!! Love your sentiment paired with this verse. Had something so hard happen today and told my husband it was a blessing in disguise. He replied that he didn't feel so blessed. My response was, "You're not looking at it through the right lens!" So this really affirms my goal today, to be thankful in ALL things! Thanks so much for sharing your art and this truth.

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  2. These are beautiful, Mary! Of course, you would have a circle gelli plate....now on my wish list! LOL! These past 8 or so years the Lord has been changing my lense to gratitude as well and it has made all the difference! Ann Voscamp's book was the beginning for real intentionality to this goal. Thank you also for the devotionals this month. This week's was a blessing and reinforced this important lense change.

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