But immediately, when Jesus perceived in His spirit that they reasoned thus within themselves, He said to them.
Mark 2:7b NKJV

“It’s the eye of the artist, Bobby” my friend’s 91-year-old grandmother replied to his protestations. “That window you installed just isn’t straight.”

“But grandmom, I checked it with the level,” Bob replied

“Check it again,” she answered with a smile. Bob sighed, set his level back on the windowsill, and was shocked to see that grandmom had been right!

How a writer sees things, or in Jesus’s case, how He perceived them, will govern what is written. My step-dad, who was a commercial artist used to tell me, “You can’t paint what you think you see, you have to paint what you really see.” Picasso’s famous painting “Guernica” was far from the realism. Instead he utilized a style that was called “Cubism.” Guernica was a small town that suffered a devastating bombing during the 1937 civil war. Though his painting misses the details that the wartime photographs revealed, it was a perfect representation of how Picasso saw its horrors.

Every writer, for better or worse puts pen to paper and paints what they see with words. While artists from da Vinci to Andy Warhol have plied their trade with red, orange, yellow, and the rest of the rainbow, writers put on paper the shades of infinitives, participles, and adverbs. Every good novelist had learned how to structure thrilling plots, write flowing dialogues, and paint vivid pictures of their characters, but those of us calling ourselves Christian writers have the added duty to do more than entertain. God calls us to see what He sees. He gives us the awesome responsibility to share what He sees, especially in seemingly hopeless situations. He asks us to level the window that the world is looking through and to notice glimmers of hope in dark places.

Just as when Jesus saw in His spirit the hearts of the Pharisees, He gave words of forgiveness for a paralyzed man, we can point to God’s grace in failure, refreshing for exhausted neighbors, laughter, and joyful stories in frustrating times. God calls us to paint more than we think we see, and even more than we truly see. He hands us a torch and asks us to shine His light on the paths of others to show the hope that He, the Master Artist, has helped us see today!