Thursday • 5/30/2024 •
We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.
“Happy Little Trees”
On her birthday Meg’s husband told her he didn’t love her and wasn’t sure he ever had. Seven months after the divorce became final, he married his girlfriend. By a happy coincidence Meg was out of town visiting my family the day of her ex-husband’s wedding.
How to spend that day? We discovered that the late Bob Ross, host and star of the TV show The Joy of Painting, had established a teaching studio in nearby New Smyrna Beach, FL. His students still teach people how to paint “happy little trees.” The promise was that in a 3-hour session we could learn the basics, and each student would walk away with a personally completed work of art. We signed up for a class.
Image: "Bob Ross FD3S" by zanthrax-dot-nl is licensed under CC BY 2.0
It was amazingly fun. We happened to sit on the back row. We couldn’t help but notice the two teenage girls in front of us who didn’t fit the middle-class profile of most of the people in the room. They were accompanied by someone who carried herself like a softer version of SNL’s “church lady.” Nobody in the class was having more fun, or experiencing more delighted surprise, at what was showing up on canvas, than these girls.
At the end of the class, we were all given the opportunity to pay a little extra to have our paintings framed – right there on the spot. Who wouldn’t want to do that after discovering they could actually paint something not just recognizable, but really kind of cool?!
I failed to catch the wistfulness on the two girls’ faces as they watched classmates’ paintings being framed. But Meg noticed. Quietly, she asked the proprietor if she could pay for the girls’ frames. Stunned, he obliged. The girls were thrilled.
My throat tightened. I knew that Meg’s divorce had strained her in every way, financially as well as emotionally. Yet as deep as the sorrow she carried within her was, her spiritual resources were deeper. On a day in which she could have nursed bitterness, she created joy for someone else.
Meg’s act was horizontal worship. The Gospel changes us from self-centered to other-centered. Vertical worship teaches people that they are profoundly loved; the bread and wine that they take in makes them different people. As theologian Alexander Schmemann quips: “At this meal we become what we eat.” That day Meg did a lot more than paint “happy little trees.” She became bread and wine to two girls, a shop owner – and me.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+