JoDee Luna's Blog, page 7

The Butterfly

When it’s time to let go…

Salt Dough Tea Light Candle Holder

Check out my YouTube video to learn how to create this unique salt dough tea light holder:

Salt dough sculpture is an inexpensive activity

Here’s some additional salt dough lessons you might enjoy trying:

Gratitude List

The soul sings sweetly when gratitude graces gently.

I’ve been thinking a lot about gratitude lately; asking, “What does it look like in my everyday life?”

Gratitude rests so sweetly in the soul; the very existence of which seems a miracle, the merging of our fragile human nature with God’s mother hen-like love. 

I’m pretty sure it has to do with being grateful for the wonderful people in my life, the beautiful home I enjoy, and the desires to create with which I am blessed.

As a retiree, most days are slow, and yet I can miss the beauty surrounding me if I don’t focus on gratitude.

Gratitude List

Ongoing Series of Gratitude Posts to Follow

So, I’ve decided to start a series of post featuring my favorites; what makes me smile, nurtures my soul, gives me reasons to live!

FaithGod is my Heavenly Father:

I can’t imagine living without God! He helps me to navigate through life. When tragedy strikes, He is my comforter. He gives me purpose in the mundane, joy in the difficult, and promise for an eternity with Him. I painted “Chosen” to reflect His love for me.

Chosen: Grafted into the vine by God. Romans 11:17-19Jesus is my redeemer:The Messenger depicts Jesus, the Messiah who brings hope, mercy, and grace to humankind.

Jesus is my Savior. He meets me in that in-between place that exists between my humanity and His divinity.

The Holy Spirit is my guide and comforter:Warrior Artist: Dare to create what God inspires!

Spent a lifetime searching for you
Unseen guide eluding grasp
Only remnants of your presence
Miracles seen in my past

Yes the trail of all your wonders
Strewn behind my tender steps
Evidence of glory’s sunder
Though the path before me kept

Blindly I will surely follow
Seeking for your shrouded will
Down through darkened valleys follow
Trusting purpose to reveal

“Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.'” Isaiah 30:21

Invisible Guide is a post that goes with this poem.

Although I’m often distracted by shiny objects the world has to offer, I always return to the surety of who God is and what He has to offer. He is first on my gratitude list.

More posts to follow…

Planting Seeds of Hope

Hope grows in the most unlikely of places, searching out souls huddled in darkened corners of despair. I know, I’ve been there, and hope found me. 

So, I want to plant seeds of hope:

Hope made possible by the gift of God’s grace.

The surety of His trustworthy nature.

His promise to never leave or forsake us.

Hope reached out to me during my darkest night of the soul. Hope found its way around betrayal, abandonment, fear, and despair. A tiny seed spoken by a kindly woman over the SANON hotline: “You’re going to be ok,” found its way into my soul. The seed grew as I joined a 12-Step support group, and she became my sponsor. 

Hope grew through the watering of words, hugs, and care from family and friends. Hope helped me to reach for the sun when my sister convinced me we should go to college and become teachers. 

Art by Elya Moline

Hope grew into a mighty tree, up from the floor of my classroom, ripening into the fruit of learning, the art of creativity, the vision for a future. 

Art by Elya Moline

Now in retirement, I have the privilege of nurturing hope in the souls of seven delightful grandchildren. 

Yes, I want to plant seeds of hope through making art, writing blog posts, and creating videos. To offer hope to people online I will never meet this side of heaven. 

I’m convinced it doesn’t take a lot to sew seeds of hope in a world torn asunder with despair: a kind word, a comforting hug, a check-in text, a scripture shared can turn a person’s despair into peace and promise.  

I expressed this desire to a YouTube viewer:

Thank you so much for your willingness to let me quote you and for your generous compliment! My hope and prayer is that God will use my art and writing to inspire, encourage, and heal, so your encouragement means a lot.

Her response encouraged me to keep planting seeds of hope:

Honey, he is already using you. I was led right to you twice when I needed it the most. Healers and artist always recognize each other. You blessed me too with a few confirmations I needed badly, and I am grateful for that. I am very happy to hear that it was your prayer to help others the way you do. That has been one of my own prayers since I was very young. Keep on writing along with the painting. Your heart and soul will touch many. He will lead them to you.

So, if you’re an artistic, remember that your creations can bring hope to others.

Destiny

Have you ever felt your life’s destiny was quite random, like the path of a falling leaf? Have you ever wrestled with unexplained longings? “Destiny” is a poem that visualizes wanting something you can’t fully describe or identify.

This YouTube video , Destiny, reflects on those feelings:

Holding Patterns

Those times in life when unforeseen circumstances force us to circle without a place to land. 

When we can’t seem to move past the moment.

When our energy drains away so we have nothing left to lift us out of the doldrums

When life severs our serenity.

Tragedy. Loss. Illness. Disillusionment. Disappointment. Failure

Everyone’s list reads a little differently, but the effects are the same:

Lack of motivation. Lack of inspiration. Feelings of purposelessness.

Eventually, we have to land when what little fuel’s left is gone, but nothing seems more dreadful than having the potential to fly but not the ability to do so.

Holding Patterns

Does God initiate them? Are they the result of choices we’ve made? Or just because we live in a broken world? Perhaps, at times, a combination?

I don’t have the answers, but I do know they are times of cleansing; times that flush out our true motivations for doing what we do. Times when we realize how desperate we are to feel important, useful, purposeful because we can’t be any of those things anymore.

I’m currently in a holding pattern. 

Retirement wipes away previous purposes as an educator.

A death in the family plunges into dark waters of grief.

The latest school shooting causes soul anguish.

A bout with Covid drains away energy.

The only piece of art I envision is one I hope will help the grieving to heal; and yet I can’t seem to conquer the creation phase where I construct the future painting in digital form. 

Nothing seems to work. Nothing looks quite right. So, I struggle with adding and removing elements in hopes I can land it. But instead, I circle this artwork with what little inspiration I have left quickly draining away. 

Holding Patterns

They happen to us writers, and we call it “writer’s block.”

They happen to us artists, and we view them much the same.

But truth be told, holding patterns happen to us all. 

Today, I’m wondering whether the only way through is to surrender to the uncomfortable landing. To let ourselves grieve and weep and empathize with those whose suffering is far greater than we could ever imagine. 

To stop fighting the feelings but sit in them. To resist wrestling with those nagging questions that torment:

When will I feel better?

When will a sense of purpose return?

When will I find something worthy of my time?

Who did God create me to be, to do, to create?

When will the world be a safer place for our children?

All my former answers to these questions feel like the metallic taste in my mouth that’s distorting my ability to “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” 

So, I sit. Plane of purpose grounded, until God’s grace fills my tank once again. 

Because the one thing I am certain of is, “Blessed is the one who takes refuge in Him.”

He is worthy of my trust while in this… 

Holding Pattern!

Salt Dough Bread and Fruit Basket

This YouTube video will show you how to make a salt dough bread and fruit basket:

The Ringing of the Bells Poem

Have you ever felt desperate for grace? Just a whisper from heaven to calm your angst? The assurance that everything is going to be ok?

The Ringing of the Bells puts into words and images this cry of the heart.

If troubles were akin to a turbulent sea crashing upon the coastline, perhaps we could hear God’s grace through the faint tinkling in a seashell.

Although we do not hear the words we think we need, heavenly sounds resonate through our souls and reassure our hearts that He is with us.

When Change is in the Air

Have you ever grown discontented and didn’t know why?

You couldn’t quite put your finger on the reason your mood darkened or you suddenly felt constrained, uncomfortable, itchy for something. I sure have.

Often this odd annoyance occurs well before change knocks on the heart’s door or peeks in through the window of our thoughts. 

It’s as if God needs us to listen before the message arrives, so He wrinkles our starched shirts, so we’ll feel itchy and awkward inside.

We search under layer after layer of emotional bedding in hopes of finding the tiny pea of irritation.

As the dissatisfaction intensifies, we begin looking outside of ourselves; scouring the horizon for a scapegoat we can blame for the sourness in our souls: a neglectful partner, an annoying friend, a political decision.

I’ve experienced this reoccurring cycle more times than I can remember, let alone count, so you’d think I’d know the drill and stop to listen. Yet every time the rustling of change happens inside my soul, I search in all the wrong places among all the wrong people until my will has sufficiently exhausted itself.

Then the message comes:

A whisper of insight in the night…An awakened excitement for an art form…A serendipitous encounter with someone…A path or purpose never before considered…

Yes, destiny sweeps us along and into the change God intends, and our soul settles until the next gale blows.

All that matters is being alone with Him…consumed by Him…one with Him. And if we open the door and let our Lord in, we find a face and form that misses us more than we could humanly comprehend.

In A Burden Shared, author David Roper expresses this mystery of God drawing us into communion with Him:

“And so He calls to me—His depths to mine. Deep within God and within me, it seems, there is a place for just the two of us, and without that fellowship we both ache in loneliness and emptiness…The idea that my longing is actually His voice calling—that idea alone—has changed the way I look at my quiet moments with God.”

Yes, discontentment is our friend—the unseen tug on the heart woes us to respond to the One who is longing to be one with us. Those flurries of change might at first ice the heart but if we bend back our head in child-like fashion and open wide our tongue, we will catch snowflakes of grace. We will experience our Lord’s longing for something new He wants to stir inside of us. And that something new just might be spending time alone in His presence so He can fill our loneliness with His love.

The Mysterious Wave-like Nature of Writing

How interesting that when I am most stripped of thought and emptied of soul, eventually, the sighs rise inside, like ocean waves, and then roll though my pen.

Something someone can relate to splashes onto paper; no guile, no posturing, just an honest description of a human dilemma. And when this happens, people relate, and I think, perhaps people relate to, and are refreshed by, writing that is real.

What a mysterious movement of soul water writing is. At times, words rise and swell and roll forth into inspired prose. Then, at other times, they lie still in one’s soul; no amount of conjuring can make them stir. The writer paddles out past the breakwater and waits, feeling depleted of creativity, exhausted in mind, threadbare of spirit.

Then, in time, the ocean’s belly of writing rises and heaves forth a thought, and that thought forms into words, collecting momentum. The writer catches the wave as it crusts and glides back into the sands of humanity.

So if you have the compulsion to write, I welcome you to the fickleness of the craft. I invite you to ride those waves of inspiration. But I also encourage you to pay special attention to those times in between the easy. Try to remember to rest, to float, to gather strength. For rest assured, your best will spill forth when you are stripped of thought and emptied of soul.