Disruption
Title: Disruption
Canvas: 24” x 30”
Date: July 13th, 2025
Cost: $500
I stand and wait for an image to come (not knowing the theme for this Sunday morning)…my mind is as blank as the canvas…. Then, I hear a hymn that moves me [Here Is Love Vast As The Ocean–William Reese]:
Here is love vast as the ocean
Lovingkindness as the flood
When the Prince of Life, our ransom
Shed for us His precious blood
Just then I get an image: I’m standing under a powerful deluge…my life of self-righteous bondage drowns…as my Life of Freedom takes its first breath.
Then, Tyler begins his message about …(coincidentally) …disruption. By demanding I love (agapao) the stranger [Matt. 22:39], Christ rips apart my cold religious perfectionism like a hurricane. But then, Jesus invites me to exchange His life for mine, so that (through my surrender) Jesus can Love every single person I encounter, and handle all the brutal waves that will hit me. Later, we sing yet another powerful song… “It Is Well With My Soul,”
When peace like a river attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot Thou hast taught me to say,
“It is well, it is well with my soul!”
The author, Horatio Spafford, spontaneously created this song when he first saw the place in the ocean where his four precious daughters died tragically at sea in 1871. A self-righteous man would have buckled and cursed God, but Jesus certainly had disrupted Spafford’s self-righteousness long before; because on that horrible day, instead of cursing God, Spafford allowed Lovingkindness to flood in…deep and wide.