CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD:

I pray and I pray and I often write my prayers, and when I am moved to hear an answer, I write that too. Here is the answer I got to my sorrow over this almost-40-year-old-body which is increasingly... well...almost 40.

GOD SPEAKS:

This is beauty. How can you not know that? Every dip and every valley in that skin you stare at so sadly. Those wrinkles, those scars, the bends and kinks in your swelling joints, the fleshy curves at your hips and waist. These are a map, every line and every shading a testament to all the places we have been, you and I together, as I led you on this journey that is your life. 

Did you not know? Do you not see? I am a painter! I paint with oils, thick and deep, mixing, pitting, brushing onto your canvas in colors brilliant and subdued. But it is the textures, the texture which is the key. My medium is not a simple color, flat and 2-dimensional. It encompasses height and weight, the oils thick or thin or sporadic from my brush. This is the beauty of my work. You are an oil painting. How can you long to be flat and smooth and shinny as you were?

I am a painter. Is a blank canvas the beauty that you crave?

I created you long ago, a blank canvas, as I create many whom I love. As any painter, I love a canvas, blank and white. To see it there fills me with excitement, with joy. It fills me with love. 

Do you think that this love comes from the whiteness of the canvas? Should I hang it then, on my wall as it is, unmarred, untouched, smooth and sleek? Would I love it if I did? No. What I love is not not the canvas. It is the potential, the excitement of the creation which is to come. Do you think this love, this joy would exist if I did not paint? If I did not intend, anticipate something better that is to come, something better than the smooth surface and bright, perfect face? 

Upon you, once a blank canvas, I have created. I have practiced the glory of creation. Each brushstroke has added texture, color, form. I have added, every day for forty years, another layer, another dip and valley, here and there, and your body has changed with my brush, colored and deepened, textured and shaded. 

Your wrinkles are deeper, the lines in your skin are longer and more pronounced. Your hands are rough and calloused. There is a scar bellow your right wrist. Smaller scars and transient cuts mar your arms. There are freckles here and there. Is that a sun spot beginning to appear?

Your face is rounder, fleshy. That slim jaw has gone. Under your eyes the skin is puffy. Your hair is cut short in deference to ease, though a longer style gave it more lift and grace. You no longer spend your money or your time on complex styles. You leave it straight and fine, the way I made it, though you do not think this suits your face as well. Your stomach isn’t flat, your hips bulge and your waist line is thick. Your skin is pitted and dimply where once it was smooth as silk. Your feet have bunions and your toes have gone crooked with arthritis and hard walking over the years.  

You look in the mirror, standing naked before God, and your eyes tear up and your shoulders slump. You turn this way and that. You look hopefully for something you don’t see. You sigh and turn away. You resolve to accept that your beauty is gone, to settle for a lesser standard and be happy with what you’ve got. 

But don’t you know? This is my masterpiece. Not that twenty-year-old in high heals and a size six dress. Not that perfect doll with the make-up and the blow-dried hair. She was just a canvas, half created, exciting and beautiful not for her own sake, but for all the potential of what she would become. 

How can you compare yourself to her and find yourself lacking? You with all the richness and texture of age. You whom my brushstrokes, my artist’s eye has created. You are the painting with all its texture and depth, its shades and complexities that a true painter can rejoice in. How can you long to be again that blank canvas, void of creation, without my genius upon you? How can you reject the true work of my artist’s self, calling instead for the shallow outline of a mere idea? A half-formed sketch.

You are my masterpiece. My work of art with depth and color and texture to claim. You are a woman, and your every curve and dent and flaw serve only to richen the painting that I am creating out of you. 

Stand again, naked before me. Know that every curve and every sag comes from my artist’s brush, every scar is my tone and texture upon you. Stand naked before me, someday, without those tears, without that sigh. And see my masterpiece for what it is - glory and beauty and genius and creation, all wrapped into one. Not lacking, never less. So much more than you were before.