Article January 2, 1989 Issue

Learning to see

We can paint the landscape of our lives with bold and beautiful colors.

Kerry M. Knobelsdorff

Once, while trying to decide how to paint a flower, a famous American artist said, "I paint what I see." Georgia O'Keeffe's contemporary works fill canvases and our eyes with vivid, striking images. She painted what she saw. Her main effort, then, was to make what she saw appreciable to us. It was interesting to learn from a documentary chronicling her life that Georgia O'Keeffe was not exaggerating or magnifying her images just for the sake of art. She saw things the way she painted them —and that artistic vision transformed them.

How often do we paint the landscapes of our lives with the limiting, depressing colors of despair because we are unaware that what we see depends largely on what we think? We tend to see our lives the way we think they are.

Christ Jesus saw spiritual reality because he understood the truth of being. He called reality "the kingdom of God."^{Luke 17:20, 21.} The master Christian perceived that kingdom here, now. Mankind, thinking materially and seeing materially, sees this kingdom of God as faraway. Christ Jesus' lifework, which culminated in sublime sacrifice of self, made what he saw appreciable to humanity.