More Thoughts On Origins:Sin

What a Sunday. You can listen to the service here. Rick – once again – hit it out of the park with his acoustic version of Gravedigger. I’m going to go back and do a quick overview of each week with the artwork and a quick bio of the artist.

Spencer was this week’s artist. He is a high school student that has autism. Normally he works with chalk, dealing in very bright and vibrant colors. These were here interpretations of sin.

His work stirred two very profound insights for me. First, there is a layer of darkness over the entire painting. Sin darkens everything it touches. Something innocent dies with sin. Always. Completely. The effects of sin are overwhelming, overarching. Fatal. Inescapable.

Second, it’s still possible to see the good through the darkness. As horrible and horrific as sin is and its effects, God’s grace is bigger, brighter, and better. It takes a greater good to beat sin and God is that greater good. Grace trumps all. The real philosophical insight isn’t – why do good things happen to bad people but rather, why isn’t worse than what it is? Why is it in every tragedy, there is still hope? Light? Yes, sometimes it is hard to see. Sometimes our perspective and where we sit in the middle of the darkness makes it almost impossible to see. But it is still there.

Very grateful to Spencer for his insight and his art.