Here we have a river cutting the Earth, creating massive cliffs on either side! Mountains that look like ice cream as they melt, and a volcano lifting up its hands! When one looks closely, the mouth of the volcano is literally that, a mouth. Roaring! If you look closely you can see the profile of a face there. It looked a little bit too creepy for my taste, so I hid the face as best as possible. Next we see falling stars, asteroids like arrows, meteorites like spears made for piercing the heart! Perhaps piercing our heart metaphorically and spiritually with a wake up call!
But what are we being woken up to?
We see “Time” displayed as the sun and moon stand still. Are we in this present moment, has gravity started to lose its force?
Exactly what are we facing here, what is the reality of the circumstance of our heart?
I can only speak for myself and I find that in my life this year, this was the perfect sort of painting to illustrate what I was experiencing spiritually.
Even before I came back to my faith I had a rather askew view of God, it was a God that encompassed good and evil. My idea of God was not full of justice. Now that I come back to my faith and I get grounded again in the Word of God (which is the text this piece is inspired from) I find that I am much more at ease knowing that I serve a God whose characteristics are listed in these pages by the prophet Habakkuk. A God who is Just, having anger against evil, not also encompassing evil, like my old idea, rather a God of fiery passion for justice, righteousness, godliness, and goodness!
In my own life it makes sense that God would come in to disrupt my heart as a river rushing through, creating long deep caverns through my Illusions and would cause me to raise up the hands of my heart in surrender and worship.
Hands that are able to receive the rebuke of God towards me. Hands that are raised up, able to receive the arrows, perhaps sometimes they are raised as a shield against the arrows, but they prove useless as my hands are not made of steel. Other times my hands are raised as an offering praying, “Take all of me, take everything! Take my whole heart and melt it like a mountain, to morph it into what is righteous and godly, to make it flow like lava from a volcano, melting all the stubborn hard pride found there, so that my heart becomes a dwelling place for The Presence of You my God.”
A heart worthy of the dwelling place of God!
Can I accept these words about righteous anger as true, even if I don't understand them?
A mountain is so large, it is a symbol of something immovable, and yet in the presence of God it melts like the wax of a candle. If I were to truly get a glimpse of God, would not my heart also melt within me?
If I think that I see God without total heart transformation, then I would argue that perhaps I have not seen God at all.