Our friend Marni has just moved, and we went over to help
her get things going in her new house.
“Do you think we can hang this?” she asked handing me a
hanging lamp made of wood and corrugated cardboard. Really cute.
“Sure,” I said taking
it from her, but after turning it round and round, I couldn’t figure out how.
When we hung it from its cord on a hook we put in the
ceiling, it just slid to the floor.
We sat down and stared at it. I guess we thought it might
speak to us or something.
I Googled, “how to hang a hanging lamp.” There was
surprisingly little help on the World Wide Web. You would’ve thought someone on
this spinning planet had faced this before or maybe everyone knows how to do it except us.
What happened next reminded me of a situation a
few years after my husband, Jerry, and I were married.
He came to me with a book he’d pulled from the shelf and held
up the spine for me to read the title. “This is your philosophy, isn’t it?” I
read the words on the book, Art from
Found Materials.
I considered his question a moment. Sometimes, people around
us can more clearly articulate our lives than we can. He was
right. I nodded, “Yes, it’s my philosophy.”
We can wait our whole lives to get just the
right tools, the right ingredients, the right resources, the right circumstances
to solve a problem, to create, to do, to be, or we can look around us and with God's help, use
what we have to reformulate the heartaches and disappointments, even the lack and create
something lovely and surprising.
It's good to set goals. But often, life hands us circumstances for which we never planned, so we can learn
to make art and beauty in those situations or we can grow bitter.
What were we going to do about this seemingly impossible to hang lamp? We considered a big box store. But neither Marni or I wanted to go, and we weren’t sure it
would even help. Between the two of us,
we determined to take on this surly lamp with what we already had.
We looked through her toolbox and spotted some climbing
cord. Purple. Hmm, maybe we could use this. Then we had the idea to take some
wire off the back of a picture frame. Somehow, after putting the two together and
a redo or two, we did it.
I'm reminded of the Nester who says, "It doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful." Oh, yes.
Who knows what you might light up? With lamps and with life.
"Here’s another way to put it: You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don’t think I’m going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I’m putting you on a light stand. Now that I’ve put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine!" (Matthew 5:14-15 The Message).
"Here’s another way to put it: You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don’t think I’m going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I’m putting you on a light stand. Now that I’ve put you there on a hilltop, on a light stand—shine!" (Matthew 5:14-15 The Message).