Yes, You Can Teach Art!

Can you imagine a more ordinary sight?

Sparrows splashing in a puddle.

Picture a thirteen-year-old English girl sitting on an old bench, looking intently at just such a puddle of chirping, splashing sparrows.

At her back is the warm, yellow stone of a beautiful cathedral, a place where God has been worshiped for 900 years.

The girl is early for an appointment with a doctor in a building not far away and only sat down here to pass the time. She’s troubled and her stomach is churning.

But not to one who is losing her sight

The doctor is a specialist in eye problems. Just a few days before, her regular doctor had stunned the girl and her mother into silence, delivering the news without softening the blow: She is losing her sight.

After a course of kayak canoe classes in the nearby river, the girl’s eyes had literally begun to cloud over. Whether because of the chemical factory up river or some nasty germ in the water, the doctor said that in as little as three months she would be blind.

So here she sits, waiting to see a specialist, watching those mundane, ordinary sparrows in the puddle.

She notices every detail of their movement, light and shadow and shape, and thinks,

This might be the last time I see sparrows splashing in a puddle in spring. Next year I’m going to be blind.

This is my story

The vivid memory of that moment is still with me decades later.

At the risk of glossing over the ending, the story of how that news affected my non-Christian mother, who cried out to God to heal me and promised to follow Him if He did, and the story of how my eyes began to uncloud, well that’s another story altogether.

But both my mother and my step-father became Christians through that incident and a few years later my mother led me to the Lord also.

Why I tell it

I write this remembrance because that trial not only brought true life to my family, it has also left me with an unquenchable gratefulness for my sight and a joy at

seeing

and creating art

and taking pictures

and drinking in the beauty of God’s creation

Yes, You Can!

I’m passionately determined to pass that on to others.

You see the job of teaching your children art is not a burden and it’s not a problem. It’s a privilege. And it’s one that begins with the simple act of being able to see.

Come with me on a journey of figuring out how art really fits into the busy homeschool day. Want to hear more? Remember to subscribe at the top right of this page.

Michelle

Real life encouragement from a real life mom …

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