Nests, Little Birds and Flying

Recent changes in my life have me looking at birds in a different light.

I have loved to draw for as long as I can remember. I’ve been painting since my teenage years and have been painting portraits of horses for paying customers since I was seventeen.

From the time I sold that first portrait to a friend, I knew I’d grow up to be a famous painter of horses, traveling the country and the world to paint the horses of wealthy horse owners and living off that work.

I have been painting portraits of horses all these years. A year hasn’t passed that I didn’t paint at least one and the number was usually closer to a dozen. A good small business, but not exactly what I’d envisioned.

So I’ve always had a job to go with the painting business. Something to pay the bills and keep me afloat. Nothing special. No career, but something to do. A ‘real job’, as my Dad often referred to it.

For the first couple of years of marriage, I was a full time painter and enjoyed it, though I found the work to be a lot more difficult than I had previously imagined. Then Neal lost his job without warning and we spent eighteen months as unemployed people, facing bankruptcy and countless other challenges. I begged God during those times to show me what to do. Keep painting or get a job. I bombarded the gates of Heaven with my requests.

And God answered my prayers. He sent a job right to my door when the then director of the Carriage Factory Art Gallery called and asked if I’d like a part-time job. I thought she wanted an assistant. Much to my surprise, she wanted a replacement.

The following 4-1/2 years were mostly good. I had a lot of fun, learned a lot of things and had a chance to try out some marketing and exhibit ideas I would never have otherwise tried.

But about a year ago, I began to feel another tug deep down inside. Was I really in the right place? Was I really doing what I was supposed to be doing?

Portrait work was suffering, each one taking longer and longer to complete. The delays frustrated me to no end and made working on any painting a chore.

In addition to that, I also began to feel a very strong pull to return to another love that had been neglected for almost as long as I’d been married: Writing. That started with a workshop in the summer of 2008 and I’ve never looked back. Writing has been a challenge, but it has also been a labor of love.

So over the course of the past year, Neal and I have discussed my return home as a full-time painter and writer. Could we do it on Neal’s income until I got my feet under me? Neal said we could. I wasn’t so sure.

Could I generate enough business and do enough good painting to make my paintings worthwhile to the market I needed to enter?

Neal thought so. I wasn’t so sure.

Could I write anything well enough to make an editor look at it, to interest an agent and, ultimately, a publisher and the buying market?

Neal thought so. I doubted.

I now think God thought so, too. I continued to doubt.

For most of the past year, I’ve been like a fledgling bird, poised on the edge of the nest, looking out (and down!) at the world and thinking about trying to fly. Wanting to fly, but afraid to take that first jump.

On Saturday, August 29, God finally said “Enough dilly-dallying. You will fly. You will fly now. Off with you!” and He gave me a push I couldn’t ignore.

I have no regrets. None of the things that followed each of the two previous times I’d lost jobs followed this one. Quite the contrary, I felt like I’d been freed from the chains of the ‘nest’ and set on a course that is frightening, exhilarating and challenging all at once.

I believe this chain of events from the workshops in the summer of 2008 to August 29, 2009 was God’s way of forcing me to take that huge, scary step I’ve been pondering for the better part of twenty years. He just had to do it in a way that left me with no doubts.

The sequence of events that followed confirm the notion.

Where will all this lead?

I have no idea. But that doesn’t matter. All I need to do is the work God has given me through the portraits of horses and other pets coming my way, other opportunities for paintings and opportunities with writing, as well.

I also need to trust God to know what’s best. He’ll take care of the rest. Even if it means pushing me out of another nest somewhere down the road.

Hopefully, I’ll be well enough attuned to His still, small voices and have sufficient faith by then to take the leap myself, rather than forcing Him to push.