Sitting in Stillness

I haven’t told anyone this yet, but I made a life-changing Amazon purchase last week. It’s a little 5inx5in journal of watercolor paper pages. Let’s get one thing right - I’m not a painter. I don’t just whip out a brush and paint, and if I do, for some once-a-year-reason, whip out a brush, I spend longer culling Pinterest for “what to paint” than I do actually painting. Usually. But this quarantine has me still. And alone enough to fail a little. So in the stillness of a Milledgeville sunset on my back porch, crickets going, I dragged the soggy brush across the empty page and made a mark. A streaky red mark across the top of my page like a banner: this page is claimed. A streaky red mark like the blood of a harmless little Lamb across doorways like a banner: these people are claimed.

They dragged the soggy hyssop branches across wooden door frames in the twilight, and 1500 years later, a soggy hyssop branch, dipped in wine, was lifted to the lips of Jesus on the cross. The perfect Lamb. The blameless one. His veins were empty so mine could be filled and draw breath and draw shapes and make marks and be marked by his Glory. In the stillness I understand that this quarantine introduces me to Jesus in brand new fresh-journal-page ways. And my favorite thing about watercolor journals is that you can’t turn the page until it’s dry. So this quarantine has me still. Waiting for the truth to set before I rush to a new page.

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by Elena Balkcom