Healing Through Art

when art swoops in

Mar 18, 2024

There used to be an old, rustic picnic table at the edge of my Mamaw’s backyard that made the perfect stage. With permission, I’d dash through the laundry room, out the garage door, and walk past the cherry tree toward the lake at the bottom of the hill where horses and goats would graze. With songs ranging from Genie in a Bottle to Amazing Grace, the animals (and neighbors) never knew what they would get. The horses usually stood there, staring at me, slapping flies off their backs with their tails, but in my little-girl heart I believed they loved my performances. I’d imagine them jumping up on their hind legs, swirling their front legs in front of them like a windmill in their own kind of applause.

I was a fractured child, learning to live within a world torn open at the seams—a world where daddies find new families and mommies sleep all day. I found solace in singing. Whether it was in my room, in my Mamaw’s garage (those acoustics were gold), or in front of someone else’s horses, using my voice felt like the one aspect of my life I could control. It was as if the sound waves of my voice grabbed my grief on the way out, sending it into the sky, up to God. I didn’t know God then but he knew me.

As I grew toward adolescence, I wrote songs that held a brokenness in them, an underlying sadness of a child forced by life to grow up too soon. A child whose mind flashed pictures of holes in walls, bloody knuckles, bags of white powder, and bruised arms. Through singing and songwriting, I found a sense of resilience. I found I could string notes together and make unsung melodies hang in the air like dust particles. I could change the neutral tone of a room to one of melancholy or even hope. Stringing together words I didn’t even understand into lyrics that rhymed, I had a place to pour out the questions in my heart. It was the first time art touched my life, but it wouldn’t be the last.

I sat under the bright blue summer sky with my journal and pens in every color you could imagine on the little table next to me. My first baby had died in my body and the grief of it all felt like a gaping hole in my abdomen seen only by me. In faith, I picked up a pen and began writing God’s Word over and over in an effort to believe what I was reading—that he was faithful, good, loving, sovereign, and caring. That he was all those things to me. Watching the clouds roll by, I’d ponder his characteristics in my mind. I’d recount all the places I found his goodness wrapping around me like a heated blanket on a cold winter day.

Meditation is art in the mind’s eye. It’s taking truths about God and painting them across the sky of your own brain. The art of doing just that was healing for me and continued to be as more babies slipped away before I could hold them. As I pondered Jesus coming to take me home, I’d picture the scene in my mind, brilliant light bursting through opaque clouds. When I walked around my garden and saw the colors of my zinnias, I meditated on this mighty Creator who made everything, from the delicate pink petals between my fingers to the tallest tree reaching into the sky. Portraits of him creating galaxies and oceans would fill my mind. I’d read about how he weeps with his people and imagine that he was weeping with me too, holding me, healing me.

“I just can’t imagine being locked inside with a baby,” a woman from my church texted me. Thoughtful as she was, I was in a sort of haven. As COVID-19 sheltered us in, my heart had room to breathe, to make sense of all that had unfolded in the previous months. How the nausea from pregnancy had turned to nausea from character assassination. How I didn’t know who was safe, how to be, or who I was anymore.

As everyone lamented lock-downs, I found a permission slip in my hand to hide away with a baby I never believed I’d meet. Each day, wounding words bounced around in my skull, but then, my sweet boy would giggle and grab my mouth with his chubby hands as if to shush my thoughts. His childlike joy, untouched by life’s heartache, painted a smile on my own face and for a while, I’d forget.

God is an artist—a sculptor. And just as he had shaped and formed my son, he was teaching me the art of motherhood, using it to heal me, even if just a little. I learned the rhythms of rocking, of singing hymns into the dark night, of kissing chubby cheeks and smashed fingers. I learned the art of soothing and caring for a child and loving someone more than you ever dreamed possible—loving someone like God loves me. Learning the art of a mother’s love was binding up my wounds.

I laid on my stomach staring at the white wall we had painted a few months earlier. I thought about the pain in my hip and leg I felt that day—how even with a baby nestled in my womb I’d been determined to finish the project, painting until 10pm. But now, that baby cried in the living room and I was so depressed I almost didn’t care. My husband tended to him and kept our toddler occupied as I carefully shimmied through the pain off of our bed. I wiped silent tears from my face, pulled my walker close, and slowly made my way to the couch.

Through the birth of my second son, I had been rendered unable to walk. When I first fell to the ground in searing pain, I couldn’t believe what was happening. Call it shock if you want, all I know is at some point, the reality set in: I couldn’t walk and no one could tell me when I would be better.

My husband took our toddler around the block and fresh tears fell from my eyes. I was desperate to go with them—to just stand up and walk to the door—but I couldn’t. Like a mouse stuck in a sticky trap, I was glued to the couch. And so, I cradled my baby in one arm and devoured the poetry I held in the opposite hand. I read from broken saints about suffering and love and loss. Like a flimsy bookmark, I found myself tucked into their words. Poems began to leap out of my heart like rabbits courting each other. Poems like this one:

A single tear
drips
on the bed
as I stare at the white wall we painted when I felt
hopeful.

Depression is a funny thing;
you don’t always see it coming.
But it comes
crashing,
like those waves at the Outer Banks
that almost drowned me.
We laugh about it now—
how silly I looked running from the shore.
But it scared me.

And so does this.
So does this.

Typing them into the notes app on my phone, I began to heal, just a little, through art, becoming a witness to God bringing beauty from something traumatic again. Hope stood in the doorway.

My oldest son sprayed water into the humid morning air as I painted a lemon onto fresh paper outside. I watched intently as thin yellow paint swirled into its own unique place, pooling in some spots. I am no artist, truly, but this past summer I began to learn watercolor. I’m fascinated by this type of art—how you can paint the exact same heart or flower over and over and each one winds up different. I love how the paint finds freedom within the boundary lines I’ve provided. It reminds me of freedom in Christ—that there is beauty in boundaries, sacred freedom found in his hand. I barely know anything about painting, but somehow just simply relaxing my desire for perfection and to be good at everything left me free to just try, free to mess up, and free to create simply for joy’s sake. Even that was healing.

Art can be misused and left unused. Or, we can grasp it with both hands and allow it to move us, heal us, grow us.

I may paint occasionally and I still sing every day, but the art in which I’ve found the most healing is writing. For me, writing is an avenue for processing pain and seeing Jesus in it. It’s how I breathe out what I’m learning, how I’m growing, and who I want to be. I wrote a book this year and I’m begging God to use it to heal others, but it was healing for me first. As I turned my story of loss into sentences and weaved God’s faithfulness into each chapter, my heart took a breath: God was doing something then; it’s so clear to me now. He’s doing something today, too. Again, art swoops in, giving me a piece of myself back, and leading me toward healing—no—toward the Healer.

Picture credit: Sarah Brown on Unsplash

Have you ever felt like God used art to heal a hurt or help in a struggle in your life? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Treasuring Christ

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