Dear Friends and Family:
Christine finished off a commissioned icon of the Ascension which is going to New Jersey shortly. The colors and forms of the figures are wonderful. Christine has been diligently daily drawing from a course put out by Sister Petra and she keeps sharpening her iconography skills. She is booked to take a week’s class from a couple of Russian Iconographers in November.
An exciting development for her has been creating a new page on her website for ordering prints of different sizes of her icons. This means they are now coming available for people around the world to purchase directly from the web. Please take a look.
Moving!!
August was a busy month also because we actually searched out and bought a new condo to live in. It has two bedrooms and enough room to empty out a storage space we have been storing paintings and photographs in. The location is much closer to the church we fellowship in and the landscaping has many old live oak trees with hanging Spanish moss. We are really excited about this change and have some painting to get done before we can move in.
Day 4 Hope
Michael took part in a local charity event with some of its’ follow up meetings called ‘Day 4 Hope’, a wonderful program to help homeless children be prepared for starting school, with medical, dental, backpacks, hair cuts, food and even a professional photograph of the parents and children. This is just a part of what this charity does and it’s program extends into the community by partnering churches with schools, which enables Christian volunteers establish strong relationships with identified families of need and help them over the long term.
People may have a mental image of Florida being a place where people go to retire, play golf, and relax on their spoils of life. This may be true for some, but actually, Florida has a very broad and vibrant community, with many more young people than old. There is a lot of wealth mixed in with a lot of people who are just getting by. There are many homeless and people in need for one reason or another. Drugs, human trafficking, environmental exploitation are all taking place; requiring armies of volunteers who try to address these issues and put people back together again. Charities, halfway houses, hospitals, twelve step programs, community minded police forces, churches and municipal agencies are all answering what Jesus referenced to in Mark 14:7:
‘For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me.’
That text for some reason calls to my mind a simple awareness which happened while I was ministering in hospital recently. I opened my eyes during a prayer session and focused on the old wrinkled charcoal black hand of a patient resting in my white fingers. He was old, in fact he may have been close to his passing. He was in the ICU ward and I was visiting whoever seemed to want or need a Chaplain. Our prayer went on and on, and I could tell the Holy Spirit was present. He kept repeating very slowly, ‘In the name of Jesus.’ He would not let go of my hand. We did not want the presence of Jesus to leave. Our backgrounds must have been so very different but we were at that point united, calling on Jesus. When Jesus shows up powerfully, you do not want him to leave.
I often wonder if we were able to have or even expect Jesus to show up, while we are ‘doing good for the poor,’ what ever aspect of ‘poor’ that was, whether, poverty, health, shame, addiction or homelessness, how much more change there would be. God is a God of miracles when we expect and really pray for it. So often he is not invited in when we are ‘doing good for the poor.’ It seems like at the most obvious times that we do need God’s presence, we tend to not invite him. Is that because it is now counter cultural to do so? Well, maybe we do invite him in. The question is do we really expect him to come?
Do we open up our eyes and say only God could have done this? Placed a black hand in a white hand and bound them together in prayer.
You are in our prayers daily!
Sending love and prayers,
Michael and Christine
Kingdom Arts Ministry 