Darren LeBlanc

I’m obsessed with perfection in art. It has been this way for quite some time now. In college I remember spending time nearly every night for 8 months working on the lyrics to a song. The message was something I valued and so I invested time to make sure it was as potent and poetic, as pen could write. If you have been a regular on this site for a while, you will recall the ridiculous amount of time I spent to get pictures of some landscapes in Maine recently. I really just wanted to be able to capture the beauty there and be able to pass it on.

Lately, my obsession has been shared by the Anthem of Hope team.  There 6 of us working on the website (to be launched in March) and the prerelease of the Encouragement Disc (April or May). We want things to be excellent because we so believe in the need and the cause of bring hope to people in the midst of illness. If I dug deeply I might find a hidden desire for AoH to be excellent because it in some aspects represents the purpose of my Misty’s suffering. So, in a sense, our dedication to the excellence of each piece of this whole movement, is a compliment to Misty. A tribute of some sorts…

But this post is not about Misty. This is about us. As creators, we want our created art to be representative of us. The shaping and the molding that takes place to bring our handiwork up to our highest held standards is time consuming and painful. I’d venture to say that God is likely as obsessed with his creation, as we are with ours. While I can write a song, he created the ears that hear it and the mind that understands it. While I can snap a picture, he created the flowers in it, and clouds that bring the rain to water them.

But we…we are his magnum opus; his greatest art. As such, we should expect shaping and molding to be a very real part of our lives as God forms us into a creation representative of the creator. For me, that long sharpening process has been, and I fully expect will remain, a painful. C.S. Lewis denotes this as the Intolerable Compliment – we are esteemed so highly that we are destined to suffer pain to as are lives are being perfected.