I pray that this letter finds you and your family doing well as we begin to see the light at the end of this virus. With the rollout of the vaccine the world now is experiencing the hope we the church have always had during the pandemic. I am so looking forward to seeing His house full again on a Sunday morning and believe that Sunday is coming soon!
Speaking of His house, Maria and I enjoy watching the home improvement shows on the HGT network. They usually buy these fixer uppers and begin to rehab them back to a house somebody would actually want to buy. It usually ends with them staging the house with furniture and accessories before the showing of the finish work to potential buyers. I always love to see how they decorate the house. Usually they have groupings of paintings with themes, sometimes they even carry this theme throughout a room. After seeing one of these shows I was passing through our quest bedroom when I began to look for the theme from the pictures we had hung on the walls. One wall was obvious, it displayed a whole array of pictures of our family. It even had above the pictures our name Hunter as if a guest staying with us would ever wonder who those beautiful people in the frames were. But the pictures on the other walls in the guest bedroom were another story. One was a picture of a man sitting on a chair, another was a watercolor drawing of orphans in China looking for a rabbit, another was a framed poster advertising a basketball tournament and lastly a picture of Curious George painting Gumbi and his horse on a wall. I walked around the room trying to see the theme of these disconnected pictures but was not having much luck seeing how they connected. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. All the pictures had been thrown out for the trash heap. I had found them all discarded, unwanted, thrown away in the trash. Two of the pictures were in the garbage bin behind my house in my old neighborhood, one was in the trash bin where I live now, and one I found in Queens NY sitting alongside of the trash waiting to be picked up by the garbage truck. All of them had been thrown away and discarded as trash. But I saw art in them, I saw something of value. Just like on Sunday morning when we gather as a family, we are like those pictures. The world may have trashed us, but He sees something of value in us, He sees “art”, His art in us! Now as I walk through the guest bedroom I am reminded that I belong to His grouping. The stone that was rejected is still gathering those that the world rejects today. I am so glad he saw enough of himself in us to pick us up from the trash heap of this world.
On display for him,