Barbara: Hi everyone- welcome to 40 minutes of faith. My name is Barbara Cox and I host this weekly podcast to explore God's word and our relationship with God.
Today, I'm going to be talking about a few things. How can we use art, or at least drawing or sketching a map that I'll tell you more about, to explore our relationship with God? I'm going to tell you how this came to be and talk about a couple of resources and then really go into detail describing how one of the Bible study groups that I participated in did this map, this life map of our faith journey.
But before we get into those details, I'd like to invite you, if you have handy any sort of paper, pens, markers, crayons, paint- If you have any of that nearby and at hand and want to grab it while I'm reading a Bible passage, you're welcome to do so.
So I would like to read Psalm 42. I got that idea from one study that I wanted to recommend called The Broken Way by Ann Voskamp. And she talked about blessings in life amidst brokenness. So that's part of what might come up on some people's faith maps- are there times of brokenness in our lives and how do we continue in our relationship with God and in our faith journey during those times of brokenness?
I facilitated this Bible study a few years ago and Psalm 42 was one of the Bible passages that she had suggested for one of the study weeks. And I'd like to read it to you from the message version, which I know is a paraphrase, not a word for word translation, but somehow I derive consolation from the words used in the message version.
Psalm 42 is a bit longer than passages that I normally read, but since we don't have a guest today, we have time to be in the word for a few minutes.
So here is Psalm 42 from the message. And if you're going to follow along in your Bible, it's a little before you get to the middle of the Bible. I know lots of folks have apps on their phones, and then you just type in Psalm and you tap on chapter 42 and it pops up in many different translations.
42 1-3 A white-tailed deer drinks
from the creek;
I want to drink God,
deep drafts of God.
I’m thirsty for God-alive.
I wonder, “Will I ever make it—
arrive and drink in God’s presence?”
I’m on a diet of tears—
tears for breakfast, tears for supper.
All day long
people knock at my door,
Pestering,
“Where is this God of yours?”
4 These are the things I go over and over,
emptying out the pockets of my life.
I was always at the head of the worshiping crowd,
right out in front,
Leading them all,
eager to arrive and worship,
Shouting praises, singing thanksgiving—
celebrating, all of us, God’s feast!
5 Why are you down in the dumps, dear soul?
Why are you crying the blues?
Fix my eyes on God—
soon I’ll be praising again.
He puts a smile on my face.
He’s my God.
6-8 When my soul is in the dumps, I rehearse
everything I know of you,
From Jordan depths to Hermon heights,
including Mount Mizar.
Chaos calls to chaos,
to the tune of whitewater rapids.
Your breaking surf, your thundering breakers
crash and crush me.
Then God promises to love me all day,
sing songs all through the night!
My life is God’s prayer.
9-10 Sometimes I ask God, my rock-solid God,
“Why did you let me down?
Why am I walking around in tears,
harassed by enemies?”
They’re out for the kill, these
tormentors with their obscenities,
Taunting day after day,
“Where is this God of yours?”
11 Why are you down in the dumps, dear soul?
Why are you crying the blues?
Fix my eyes on God—
soon I’ll be praising again.
He puts a smile on my face.
He’s my God.
I wish I knew how to compose music. Cause I think this would make a great song. And for all I know someone already has and I just haven't heard of it. So let me know if you know of a song based on Psalm 42.
So the activity that I mentioned came about in a few different ways. I attended a workshop so long ago that I don't remember anymore who taught it and I don't have any teaching materials. So I'm really just going off my memory of the experience, which was a very positive one. I suspect that there are additional resources out there, but I'm not looking to present to you the work of someone else, just the creative work that I did with this group that I was participating with at the time, so that you can be creative yourself.
There isn't a strict formula that you have to follow, but I suspect that if you are interested in really digging around, there's probably resources that can help you. But we had a lovely group of ladies that were meeting in Germany and we had a study called knowing God by Name by Mary Kassian.
And there are so many different names of God. Many I had never heard of. And then some that I had heard about and associated with moments in the past, for example, El Shaddai, that name was familiar to me because of the song by Amy Grant, El Shaddai, that I absolutely loved that song.
And of course, El Shaddai is still a name for God today. It's just one that doesn't come to my mind all of the time. And we've talked about in previous podcast episodes, the name Abba, which means father and people still use the name Abba today for their earthly fathers, as well as it being used in the Bible for our heavenly father.
So both of those examples brought to my mind the idea of relationships with God where the names are associated in my past. Not that they are no longer associated, but just that's when I first heard of them. And then we also learned about many additional names for God. So those are available in that particular study, as well as in other resources, but that put together with my memory of this past workshop led me to suggest for our study group this time that we do some arts and crafts.
And part of it also was that many of our studies included a video lesson and this particular study did not include a video lesson. So we had actually an hour and a half for our study. And there was time to do this project. We weren't taking away from the study in any way. I understood it as supplementing the experience, especially taking a look at our faith journey over our lives.
So we just used regular 12 by 12 paper, which is standard size for scrapbooking paper only because I had a whole bunch and I wasn't really doing a lot of scrapbooking at that particular time during that period of my life. So I was really happy to share it with people. But I imagine if you had really huge paper poster paper, or butcher block paper on a roll, you could make this faith map really big. And if you are someone who is mathematical or logical, or linear thinking, you could just draw a line across a piece of paper that would be sort of the timeline of your life.
But I would encourage you to draw different shapes, like there was a snake on the paper or if you had some rollercoaster moments in your life that may have either impacted your faith or somehow just was an important part of your life, even if it didn't feel like a particular faith moment at the time, you could draw loops sort of like a rollercoaster or up and down like a wave. There's really infinite ways of doing this. You could do a spiral, you could just make any kind of crazy shape you want. There's no rules about this. The first workshop that I did that I had mentioned many years ago, I just drew a line across the paper.
We didn't have particular supplies that I can remember. And I just drew kind of lines up and lines down for years. And there's also charts that you can find online and in books that talk about, well, during this period of my life, In these different areas, this is how my relationship was with God, what else was going on in my life at the time, to try to look at your spiritual growth. But I like the visual aspect of it. And I love using brightly colored pens, markers, crayons, and then you can embellish it with anything you like glitter, stickers, or no embellishments. It's not required.
So part of the beginning of our faith journey is our youngest years that we may or may not even remember. So most of you already know that in my faith tradition, we have infant baptism. So I was baptized in a military chapel because I was born on a military base and I don't have any firsthand recollections of that baptism, but it's still very important to me.
I actually still have the service bulletin from that chapel service. I know that either not all traditions do that, or people come into their faith journey a little bit later in life. So that's totally fine.
So there's no demarcations on this map. Like you have to have a certain number of inches or millimeters in this line from when you were a baby or a child- it's really open to your experiences. Do you remember going to Sunday school as a kid, or maybe did you go to a parochial school where you were getting religion lessons?
Or was it just part of your everyday family life? If your family practiced other faith traditions that you grew up, just observing and learning about faith matters. You're welcome to use words or numbers if you want to put years or your age, or drawing, if you have that gift and they don't have to be fancy drawings, nobody's going to be looking at this unless you want to share it with somebody. So you can make this map any way that you want. As linear and logical as you want, or as wavy and all over the places you want.
And for some of us who grew up in the military community or other types of life moving around, I drew an airplane up in the sky on my faith map because I've been in lots of airplanes and they weren't all related really to faith, but mostly just moves in my life. And then faith did come into play in the places that we went.
So on your faith map, you don't have to draw the map first, but for me, that helps. So you can draw your map as you go, or you can start off at the beginning with either a line or loop-de-loop rollercoaster or a squiggly snake across your page, that's just going to show these different times in your life.
I attend Sunday school as a little kid. I participated in youth group in high school and sang in children's choirs. I rang in the handbell choir starting in high school. So I drew a picture of some musical notes and a handbell not anything fancy, no beautiful drawings. You could also actually put this whole thing into a scrapbook, which if we've got time at the end, I can mention that also. This is supposed to be a one-page activity that you could even do in a notebook. You don't have to put every single detail down you can if you want to.
You can pick key experiences or highlights or lowlights for you at certain times, if there was a struggle, if there was a time of brokenness. I have a quote that I want to read to you from Anne Voskamp's book, The Broken Way. On page 17, she writes, how does the interior of your soul live with broken things, through broken things?
So this could be a really personal experience and intense experience for you. And I trust that you have supports in your life, or you can just kind of decide, I don't need to get into all of these details on this particular activity, but if it brings up sad memories or situations from the past that you might need some additional support around, I would encourage you to reach out to any variety of counseling type support or faith based leadership.
Or we've talked about spiritual direction in here before. There's a lot of different resources out there to get that help, because I want to acknowledge that I didn't say draw a line from the bottom left corner up to the top right corner so that we can talk about the pinnacle of our astronomical growth and relationship with God.
Now, hopefully there have been times of growth with God, but if life has you down in the dumps, or if the title of this book The Broken Way, sounds really interesting to you, also to acknowledge that there are challenging times in our lives and it was in the Psalms it's in the Bible. This is an ancient text from thousands of years ago.
The Bible doesn't say that life is always just full of sunshine. But that there are blessings in our life as well as times of these tremendous challenges. So as you take a look at your faith journey, were you exploring God, did you have lots of question marks or maybe God and faith weren't a significant part of your life early on.
And how about relationships? Some people drew wedding rings. And maybe there were already some funerals at that point in your life. So whatever you want to draw or note that was important to you. For some people, their grandparents were people of faith in their lives. The whole experience of someone passing away and you either go to the funeral or you don't. If you're younger, people might decide that you shouldn't go to the funeral, but you still know that something happened that this person isn't around anymore. So how do we make sense of that? So all of these different life experiences can be documented along your faith journey map- babies, children, adoptions, struggles with fertility.
I learned a new word the night that we did this activity, and that was “angel babies”. I know that there's many other ways for people to think of the situation of either a miscarriage or any other situation that is a matter of the heart as well as of course of the body.
And then could be a question for God? Some of my friends have said, you know, nobody talks about this stuff. Maybe people talk about it more now. But when I first was hearing these conversations, I still think it's a fairly taboo topic. I've seen a few blog posts and people have given testimonials just that this can be perceived by many people as a hidden struggle of miscarriage. And could there be aspects of shame to that or struggling with fertility? I used to work with teen parents and some of them didn't want to get pregnant or that wasn't the goal was to get pregnant and have a baby.
And so sometimes it seems like, well, how come having babies is really easy for some people, not that having the baby or raising the baby is easy, but just in terms of getting pregnant and having a baby and then other people are just struggling for years and years and years with that process and heartbreak.
So some people put those situations on their faith attorneys. And then also physical relocations, just geographic. I moved to this place and I had the opportunity to attend more different Bible studies or find a new church service and grew in my relationship with God.
The last episode talked about that I sang in a praise band at a church in Massachusetts. So I would just sprinkle music notes over my whole life. I sing in a choir now and it's an online choir cause there's no choir rehearsals where I live in New York state, and I'm singing with a choir out in California and everything is online.
And then some people shared voluntarily just in this group that there were some times of pain and struggle. One example was that a person had felt rejected by a faith community for reasons that I felt just so sad and heartbroken to hear of that situation.
Someone else was having some struggles that they described as spiritual warfare. Where they felt that they were just battling with forces of darkness, and that can look different ways with different people. So you can have whatever you want on your map, you don't have to put it down if this is just a very private thing for you, but I can imagine even maybe a cloud with lightning or something, in terms of like a stormy time. Or even just a frowny face because I don't really consider myself to be that good of an artist, or I would even take a crayon and just make a bunch of squiggles for a difficult time.
I also felt close to God in times of nature and in times with my pets. So we took a trip somewhere and we were out in nature and I can do mountains cause they're triangles and I can do flowers cause they're circles with little like pedals around them. And my cats are kind of ovals with tales and triangles for ears and stick legs.
So you can draw whatever you like on your faith map to the extent that you're interested or have this gift. And if you're just using a line like I did the first time, you can have years and you can use words or anything that you like to document this. And then if you have a favorite Bible verse, if you want to include that in there somewhere, you don't have to have a favorite Bible verse, or you could have multiple favorite Bible verses or faith songs or hymns that are meaningful to you. This is really your art. This is your creation, and you can do whatever you want with it. If there's a gap in the road, however you want to demarcate that, that time of spiritual dryness or you felt kind of separated from either God or from the church on earth for various different reasons. All of that can be documented just as you see fit. And this can fill up as much if the pages you like, or we don't know the number of our days. God knows the number of our days, but knowing that there's still a future paths for us to go on.
So that was a really enjoyable experience for us, that we did during this Bible study time. And we had been meeting together for a while. So this wasn't the first time, like a bunch of strangers in the room together saying, Oh, now tell me about your life. So some people felt comfortable sharing some examples of their faith journey maps with each other at the end of that time. So I would invite you to do this on your own.
And if this is something that sounds kind of interesting to do with a group, I don't have a list of rules on how to do this. There might be other resources out there on this topic, I decided to not do tons of research and give examples from other sources, because I don't want to present someone else's information as if it were my own, but I'm sure that there is information out there that you can get if you'd like to do this.
I have another example of something that we did in this same group, and then I'll speak just briefly about scrapbooking as well as it relates to our faith journeys. In this same group that I had mentioned, we created a prayer calendar. And again, I did it just on a 12 by 12 piece of scrapbooking paper, but there's so many different ways of doing prayer journals or prayer calendars.
It really, really helped me to just have this focus, just a piece of paper that can sit on my desk or I can stick it in my bag or tip it to the wall . And I took a coin, maybe a quarter or depending on what size paper you have and just drew circles , the days of the week at the top and then seven circles in each row for the days of the week. And then I wrote something inside the circle. So you might not need to trace a coin or any other object that you have, that you want to trace. I put in a heart every once in a while. I can do that or a house, which for me is a square with a triangle on top to pray for our homes and people who don't have homes. So you can do any shape you want.
And then we shared with each other, how can we pray for each other during this upcoming month? So I'm going to actually read you the things that we wrote together. Because they're worth praying for every day. One particular person asked for prayers for her father. We had a couple of people in the study with children going to college. So we were praying for college students. We wrote health in one of the days. Some of the people were students themselves. So certainly adult learners. So not only college students, but for our own ongoing learning, even if it's a Bible study, doesn't have to be a formal educational setting.
We prayed for marriage. We prayed for missionaries. We've prayed for wisdom. Safe travels. We prayed for a particular friend of someone in the study, needing prayers. We prayed for a family that had experienced a fire recently in their home.
We prayed for governments. We're commanded to pray for leadership in the Bible. We prayed for patience. We prayed for teachers and friendship and self care. We prayed for salvation that we can share God's word with people. We prayed for children. We prayed for chaplains. We prayed for enemies. We prayed for a couple of people's names on here that we prayed for each other every week. So we knew who these people were. Someone's grand child and our families. So you can write anything you want inside these circles, whether you're doing it with a group of people or just yourself.
So for scrapbooking, I attended a workshop about 10 years ago from someone who showed how to do this and just gave absolutely beautiful examples far beyond my own talents in scrapbooking, but I just wanted to encourage you. If this is something that's of interest to you, it actually doesn't even have to be a photo album. If you have photos and you want to do this with photos, that's great. I have tons of photos, but this could even be a journaling exercise that's a little bit more in depth than the faith map that we had talked about at the beginning. Especially if you're either good with words or just you express yourself well, and you don't even have to write it down, there's all kinds of voice dictations softwares these days that can do this for you.
I had mentioned at the beginning of the faith map with my baptism, that I still have the program and photos. So your scrapbook doesn't have to start with baptism- many people's faith journeys don't start with baptism where you might not have a photo of it, but as you do have photos of life. If this is part of your family faith walk of any type of faith, photos of possibly religious holidays or any holidays , even Thanksgiving, a lot of people are thankful for many different things. And for some people it's gratitude to God for these blessings- that may not be how everybody sees it, but my faith album doesn't have a lot of family holiday photos cause I kept those in separate albums. But just depending on how many photos you have, you could have, I'm grateful for all of these blessings in my life. That would be perfectly fine if you want it to have a separate faith album.
So for me, I had photos of handbells that I've taken of handbell choirs over the years, even music, I put music in there because it just is so meaningful to me, but the majority of it is photos. So in my faith tradition, I was confirmed when I was in junior high school and had to take classes. Certainly don't have any photos of the classes, but I do have photos of that Sunday when I was confirmed me and my big glasses. But anyway, and that's okay. That's just the way it was back then. Probably some of you have big glasses. Well, I guess they're back in style now. So what comes around, goes around, right?
And then you may want to have wedding photos , if for you, a wedding was in a church, part of a faith journey. And then I don't have a lot of pictures of Bible studies. That's actually something that I'd like to do better at in the future, because normally when you go to a Bible study, you don't really take a lot of pictures in the Bible study, but sometimes on retreats we would take groups. So those are all in there over the years.
And then I bought some paper that had rocks on it. Now you could take pictures of rocks or draw rocks- you're probably better at drawing rocks than I am. They're not even that hard, but I liked the photos of the rocks. So there were different kinds of rocks. And I used those as background to illustrate the concept of this faith journey that I'm on because we've moved so many times. So sometimes I would take a picture of the outside of a church building or stick a copy of the Sunday bulletin in there, or take a picture of the inside of the church where we attended, or if there were any special activities at the church, sometimes there were photos of that.
So you can basically just document all of these faith moments in your life. Or if you go to a particular retreat center over and over again, maybe even summer camp, I have a page in there of the summer camp that I went to when I was a kid because it did focus on Christian themes. I'm pretty sure it was just a regular summer camp. We did arts and crafts that went on hikes, but then we did sing faith-based songs and things like that. So I considered that part of my faith journey.
And scrapbooks is one place where people don't put as much the heartaches and the disappointments, but I sometimes at people's funerals or the visitation, you get a little card from the funeral home about this person. So those could go in there. I don't have a lot of photos of funerals again, to me that just feels sort of awkward, but to really honor the person's life and the role that they played in your life or obituary or something like that, those could be part of a faith situation for you.
And then if there's anything else that I'm omitting from other faith, traditions, just insert what's important to you. I actually ended up putting some more papers in the scrapbook that I normally wouldn't. I would normally just stay focused on photos, but I ended up writing down on little note cards they're called photo mats- it's just a piece of paper that you might put underneath the photo to kind of show it off and they might be brightly colored, or you can get some that have lines on them.
So you can do a little bit of journaling right in your scrapbook. I had a few pages where I wrote down all of the different Bible studies that I've participated in over the years because they were so meaningful for me in my faith journey. So for example, one study is called the armor of God, and that was written by Priscilla Shirer. And it really goes into so much detail about the Bible passages that talk about literally these pieces of armor, but what they mean for our faith journey. And so I wrote down just the names of the studies on one page.
I printed out some of the prayers that Stephanie has written. We've known each other for more than five years now. So since she writes the prayers for the podcast, I don't mind saying I've been reading Stephanie's prayers for five years now and some of them I printed out and I actually stuck them in the faith album.
And that's just a gift that I would like to encourage you as listeners to consider as well. This might not be for you, this whole faith journey mapping business or scrapbooking or journaling, but that we each have different gifts. And we've talked about that before, and maybe you have a gift of being able to pray for other people. And I just want to also lift up that that can really bless other people as well. And you might not want to pray out loud or you might not feel confident to pray out loud, but just know that being a prayer warrior is a huge gift to other people.
And so I just want to say thank you in case people either don't know or don't say thank you. And you might even be thinking, well, I don't know if I'm that good at praying, but there's no standard for prayer. I'm not promoting a standard for prayer. Maybe you think, well, I can't pray like this person in my church praise or this person on TV, but who's to say there's not one right way to pray.
The Bible passage, Psalm 42 talks about just yearning for God and crying out to God. And why am I blue and help me, God. There's no formula for prayer. So just know that we all have different gifts.
The purpose of all of these activities is not only just to have fun with arts and crafts, especially if that's something that you enjoy, but also to take a look back at our lives in a different way that might allow new insights to come up.
When did I feel especially close with God? When did I maybe feel a bit more separated from God? Or was there a deep chasm of that time? Did I think of God in different ways, maybe some of the names of God that we had talked about before, or maybe that has just been a constant throughout your life, and you haven't really had different names for God. I have been with different faith groups, even ways of praying and talking with God have changed over the years. So I just wanted to invite that, to welcome that, and for you to look back at what you've created and see hope for the future or lessons learned from the past and hopefully gain a sense of trust in God and see that there were different unexpected opportunities. Maybe life turned left when he thought it was going to turn right or the other way around, but that hopefully things are continuing on in your faith journey, knowing that there are ups downs in our different seasons.
Resources:
The Broken Way by Ann Voskamp
Psalm 42
Knowing God by Name by Mary Kassian
The Armor of God by Priscilla Shirer