On Making and Being Made

Dear friends! It is with such joy I am returning to this space.

I truly intended to share more with you throughout this last year of grad school, but as it turns out, getting a master’s degree in one year’s time is quite the all-encompassing endeavour and I needed to sink all the way in to what this season had to offer.

But I’m joyfully back with a freshened up format and a cup overflowing.

Over the past several months, I have been knee-deep in theological research. Books pile high on my kitchen table. Post-It notes filled with momentary genius cover every inch of my life. Cups of tea grow cold next to me as I scribble and type and pace about the room. 

I walk along the pier. I record a voice memo. I whisk banana bread and make (another) cup of tea to sit near me (more for moral support than consumption).

I collect fragmented thoughts and weave them together. I did not know to become a writer was to become a seamstress. But here we are. Type, sit, wonder, weave.

Pen and page. Tap and think. Needle and thread.

What feels like my life’s work is poured out in Times New Roman. Twelve point, to be exact.

Throughout this process, I have been reminded of two things. The first, that I love a long form writing project. There’s something about the way it requires you to distill big ideas into black and white words that delights and invigorates and humiliates me in the best way possible.

And the second, that to write in the long form—or really, to write at all—is to, in a certain sense, wrestle with an angel.

Last month, I had the joy of attending the Rabbit Room conference in Derbyshire, England. Author and artist John Hendrix spoke words on creativity that linger with me still:

“There is something about good art that resists being made. There is something about the process that requires us to fight our way to making something beautiful.”

To make good art, to make something meaningful, one often finds himself in tumbling and fighting—wrestling with the work set before him, or perhaps more often, wrestling with the things he encounters in himself.

As I’ve been writing my final dissertation on the icon tradition, I keep returning to the concept of Creator and creation; art and artist; maker and made.

We are, as persons, the artwork of God. But we have not yet fulfilled our true telos, our true end. We have not yet reached eternity. And so, in a certain sense, this life is the ongoing process of being made by God. We are, of course, in our mother’s womb, whole and complete, the entirety of our personhood given to us at the first moment of our conception. But we are not yet purified. We are not yet living in the fullness of glory our hearts were made for.

In each new moment, we are being created afresh, sung into being anew. While we are first created by God, we never cease to be created by Him; He never stops willing us into being—for if He did, then we would cease to be at all.

In other words, we are always already made and being made.

And how often do we find ourselves resisting our Maker’s work in us, wrestling and tumbling our way —

There is something about good art that resists being made.

In the same way we wrestle out our work, our words, our stories and song, so God is making us.

He is meeting us our weakness and our resistance. He is making us new in spite of our own hesitancy to let Him in.

His goodness and mercy are following us. Even as we stray.

As so, in our making and in our being made — we are wrestling with the Angel of the Lord. We are being made new both as we create and as we are being created.

And we will not walk away the same. Like Jacob, we will walk differently. We may limp away from our encounter — undone and made new all at once.

But perhaps this isn’t a hindrance, but a gift. A reminder that we have encountered the Spirit of the Lord, and we are forever touched and changed and shaped by it.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to encounter Truth and not be marked by it. I don’t want to experience Beauty without being wounded. I don’t want to taste Goodness without being made new.

Such is the process of being blessed — as our art resists our making of it, and we resist God’s making of us, we become not only those who seek epiphanies of beauty, but we become an epiphany of God Himself.

We walk differently, that one day, we too, might echo the words of Jacob: “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.” (Genesis 32:30)

And so we fight—and make something beautiful. And what’s more, God fights for us—and we are beatified.