Have you ever come across people with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement? They assume they can walk all over you, treat you as their inferior, use you, control you. I’ve run across them.
I’ve even experienced them practicing their entitlement on me. I can always tell when it’s happening and put a stop to it.
I hope you know when your being used. I hope you aren’t a user.
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Another image from the depths of my unconscious. Our girl finds protection from the storm under a huge, ancient tree. Isaiah 4:6 promises that there shall be “a refuge and hiding place from the storm and rain“. She found it! You can purchase a print of it here.
Note to newsletter members only: take advantage of my 50% off sale with free shipping on all my original art and fine art prints (including the image above). It ends midnight tonight! Purchase your art and I’ll refund you 50% when I see I’ve received your Paypal payment.
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Welcome to another FREEBIE FRIDAY giveaway. I’m giving this ORIGINAL watercolor and ink painting away. It’s a miniature measuring 2.5″x3.5″ and is painted on Strathmore watercolor paper. I call it “Evergreen Moon”. Evergreens symbolize eternity. And in the bible the moon is one of the signs of everlasting provision.
It doesn’t come matted or framed, but I’m showing you a picture of what it will look like once it’s ready to hang. It is signed by me, the artist, dhayward. It’s an ORIGINAL PAINTING! Not a copy or print.
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Today is an exceedingly sad day for happy reasons. Lisa and I are driving our youngest child, our daughter Casile, to university. It’s only 2.5 hours drive away, but we won’t be seeing her for a while. She’s a wonderful daughter and has become a great friend. So I’m going to be gone for the whole day. I’ll do my best to check emails and respond to nakedpastor, Facebook, Twitter and emails.
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There are all kinds of obstacles to your success. If they are not in your own mind, then they are in the minds of others. There are some people who encourage success. But there are also a lot of nay-sayers out there. As Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid would say: “Ignore everybody!” (Get the book! It’s a good read.). I don’t know how many times in my life I have run into the attitude, “Who do you think you are?” Most people don’t say it, but they think it. Talk of success is really cool until one experiences it. Then many others grow resentful and suspicious.
I heard an interesting statistic the other day: people tend to pull away from friends who are very generous to others. The reason? They don’t like to be made to feel guilty for not being generous. They don’t want to be reminded of their lack of generosity. So the conclusion was that if you decide to become generous, be prepared to lose some friends.
But you will make new ones.
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It is often said that our god is too small. It may also be said that our world is too small. We start with the good news that the whole world is loved, that Compassion is for all things, and we end up with tiny, myopic, self-centered worlds, all separated from each other by our own categories and boundaries.
There is a Beloved reality that permeates all things… above, below, around, within and through. We must begin to detect it! This Compassion has thoroughly flooded everything and carries all in its current. This is the major theme of the New Testament. Is it not?
This truth… that all are now included… is what caused such consternation among the gate-keepers and joy among those who received it.
How can we build local spiritual communities that can enjoy the intimacy of relationship, mutual support and unity, while at the same time appreciating within these small communities a comprehensive and compassionate embrace of the whole world? How can we understand this Love as particular as well as universal, personal as well as common?
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This week’s Illustration Friday theme is “immovable”. I thought, “What is the most immovable thing in the world?” I immediately thought of prejudice. Hence the cartoon.
Wikipedia says that prejudice is a prejudgment: i.e., an assumption made about someone or something before having adequate knowledge to be able to do so with guaranteed accuracy. It includes unreasonable attitudes or a priori beliefs that are unusually resistant to rational influence.
The problem with prejudice is that the one who is prejudiced usually doesn’t know it. He thinks he already has all the information needed to have the attitude or belief. So the trick that prejudice plays in the mind is: rather than knowledge leading to the attitude or belief, the attitude or belief pre-exists and forms the so-called “facts” that shape the prejudice and fuel it into action. It is a vicious circle rotating around the axis of illusion which always gains momentum. Prejudice, as in this cartoon, lodges in the mind and pretends to be informed knowledge.
How do I move the immovable in my own mind? The secret of prejudice’s power of immovability is my blindness to it, my ignorance of it. So the first thing I have to do is see this thing called prejudice in my mind, or at least see that it is possibly there. Once this is admitted as possible, once it is acknowledged and even seen, then the prejudice begins to lose its power.
But this is most difficult because it may mean that those attitudes we relish, those facts we hold fast, those beliefs we hold to be true, may all be false.
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(Click on image for a larger picture in order to see the detail in his eyes.)
I am giving away a 7.5″x9.5″ (19cm x 24cm) fine art print of this portrait of “Jesus, 12 years“, OR: any print of your choice from my cartoons or from my fine art. Read the instructions on how to win below.
I recently had a dream in which I saw the face of Jesus at 12 years of age. He was standing in sunlight against a white wall. He was tanned with black hair and freckles. His eyes were very peculiar. There was a cross in his eyes. It had to be drawn. It is pen and ink, graphite pencil and charcoal on Strathmore vellum.
Something I learned in the church: organizations and the cross don’t get along. Like the human being, at the core of an organization’s spirit is the overpowering need to survive and not die. The protection of the organism is the primary impulse of the human mind. It is the same with organizations like the church. The cross is antithetical to this. The cross may be hung, adored, preached and heard, but it is rarely taken up.
“As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set his eyes toward Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51).
Luther says the same of Paul: “In every creature Saint Paul, with his sharp, discerning, apostolic eye, perceived the holy and beloved Cross.” What was different about Jesus, however, was that the cross he foresaw shaped his present life. The social philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy wrote: “Man as an animal organism lives forward from birth toward death, but, as a soul who knows beforehand that he will die, he molds his life looking backward from the end.” The gospels indicate that the reality of the cross permeated the life of Jesus from the beginning. And he allowed it.
Singer/songwriter/poet Leonard Cohen said, “Mankind must rediscover the crucifixion as a universal symbol, not just an experiment in sadism or masochism or arrogance. It will have to be rediscovered because that’s where man is at… on the cross!”
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Thanks to Barbara on my facebook for giving me the idea to put “y’all” instead of “you”. More Southern!!
I think this is how it would be said down south. I met my wife Lisa in Springfield, Missouri in 1978 at college. I am from Canada and she is from the deep south of Alabama. It was an extreme culture shock when I first went there. For one summer I worked as an intern assistant pastor at her home church. Pentecostal. It was quite an experience watching people being judged into different categories of saved and not saved, Spirit-filled and not Spirit-filled, living in sin and living in holiness, serving the Lord and serving the devil, tight with Jesus or far away from God, faithful member or backslidden, tither or faithless, demon-possessed or demon-oppressed.
But that’s not just a southern phenomenon. It’s everywhere, including where I live. When it comes down to it, when we judge others we are saying we are in and they are out.
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Please join my newsletter. I’m giving away a high resolution print for members to download and use on their computer screens or to print off to frame. It’s my new weekly gift to newsletter members. Instead of “Watercooler Wednesdays”, I’m calling it “Watercolor Wednesdays”. Get it?
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artist. cartoonist. teacher.
