A couple of years back I received a prophetic word that contained this statement, “seek Him in the abstract, seek Him in what gives you pleasure because that's where He's going to be teaching you lessons.”
I remember smiling and thinking, “abstract?!”
I was never an arty type as a young person. I leant more towards legal and administrative endeavours as I left school. Yet as life happened, marriage, children, and then a divorce, I found myself seeking the Lord for help to put my life back together. Depression, anxiety, fear, overwhelm had taken over and I had lost myself under the trauma of several very difficult years.
What was the Lord’s response to my life circumstances? Art classes.
I felt His very gentle tug to join my local art group and just be in amongst artistic people. At first, I struggled to go. The battle in my mind was intense.
“Why would you want to go there?”
“Who do you think you are, an artist?”
“You’re being silly. You don’t know a thing about art.”
The noise kept a steady volume and intensity, and still deep inside me there was a pull that kept inviting me to come.
When I would go, I’d find the Lord and His presence. He’d speak to me through the art processes about Himself, about me, about the ways of the kingdom. It was something beyond what I could put into words at the time and something I kept hidden in my heart, too scared to share. No one around me was going to understand what I was experiencing.
Then several years later this prophetic word happened. This word which not only confirmed what I had already been experiencing, was now calling me into the abstract. Now honestly this was another stretch. I didn’t do abstract. I was now a ‘colour in the lines’ girl. I had been teaching myself how to draw and how to do watercolours which required structure and form. In my mind I needed the lines, shapes, and framework if anything that I was creating was going to be considered art. To go outside this structure was so uncomfortable, it confronted all the spoken and unspoken rules and honestly just made me feel scared.
The word “abstract” is from a Latin word meaning “pulled away, detached” with the idea that something is being detached from a physical or concrete, reality.
Yes, that was what God was doing. He was pulling me away, detaching me from the old realities, the old rules, the old understandings. Dare I say, He was detaching me from the old religious systems that I grew up with and inviting me to experience Him and His glory flow.
Why do I share all this with you?
Over this past 16 + months I have experienced the Lord in a mind-blowing NEW way. A way that He has led me into, as He’s gone deeper and further into my heart, returning me to the truth and innocence of my identity in Him, and then calling me forth to birth the new with Him.
It has been the living expression of the scripture:
“I am doing something brand new, something unheard of. Even now it sprouts and grows and matures. Don’t you perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and open up flowing streams in the desert.” Isaiah 43:19 TPT
He has been leading me in “new ancient” ways. That seems to be two opposing forces yet it’s kingdom. The new that no eye has seen, or ear heard and the ancient ways that have been established for us before time began. (1 Corinthians 2:9, Jeremiah 6:16)
That ‘way’ has found its expression in my abstract prophetic paint pours and it has unlocked the mysteries of my heart that I didn’t know were there. The hidden things that have struggled to find language and a way to be released. When the Lord and I paint pour together, it’s a moment in time where I step into His glory, and He releases prophetically through me not just an abstract artistic expression that has been seen in heaven and now on earth but also the language that interprets the expression.
For example, pictured above is the beautiful “Esther.”
The word the Lord gave me for this explosive piece draws upon Ester 4:14 (NKJV).
“For if you remain completely silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?””
I sense the Lord saying that this is a season of the expression of the hidden things of His heart. Those who perceive this moment and have walked with Him in the new ancient ways have been prepared to release this expression. They will find a greater measure of the Lord’s glory upon them to set the captives free and usher the beloved into the new with the Lord.
I have sought the Lord in the abstract and in doing so have discovered something so new, unique, and brilliant that I didn’t know was there. And today, I believe that the Lord is inviting you to do the same.
Seek Him in the abstract, seek Him in what gives you pleasure because that's where He's going to be teaching you lessons.
Love and blessings,
Kerri-Ann
Art by Kerri-Ann YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1ml0jTWmP3YmfLLpTkathw