This
is a print of a painting by Andrew Wyeth called: "CHRISTINA'S WORLD".
Viewing this image naturally begs the following questions:
- Who is this woman?
- Why is she alone, out in the middle of a field?
- What is the significance of the house and other buildings in the distance?
- What is happening to motivate her to get there at all costs, even to the point of dragging herself along the ground?
- What is the story that this picture is telling?
Hold
that thought.
I
recently read a blogpost by a martial artist who wrote:
“What is my
mission in life? To help all I can, be the best that they can be. I know that
sounds like a slogan, but it is my life. I work very hard every day to do so,
at great personal expense and trouble to help. I think it was Jigoro Kano who
stated, “We cannot only learn from our own life experiences, we must learn from
others.” That quote I found in Chris Crudelli’s book, “The Way of The Warrior.”
We who help are warriors. We teach our students how to preserve a modicum of
peace in their own lives; even though we face troubles, uncertainty, and many
stresses.” For more: One Perspective on the Martial Arts
I
found the concept of a warrior being someone who “helps all others be the best
that they can possibly be,” to be oddly counterintuitive at best. From dictionary.com, warrior is defined as:
1) a person engaged or experienced in warfare; soldier. 2) a person who shows
or has shown great vigor, courage, or aggressiveness, as in politics or
athletics.
To
be honest, a politician never has entered my personal image and conception of a
“warrior.” An athlete? Maybe… I picture a warrior as a person who shows or
has shown great vigor, courage, or aggressiveness while engaged in warfare as
either a soldier or as a patient fighting for their life against some medical
condition or as a person bravely overcoming or at least humbly facing seemingly
insurmountable circumstances and courageously living life with honor and
dignity in spite of their problems and challenges. However, I never pictured a
warrior helping others be the best they be.
Perhaps, it is due to the popular slogan for the US Army that goes, “Be all you can be. U.S. Army.”
Yet,
considering I’m a Christian, we faithful disciples of Christ, shouldn’t find
the concept of a warrior actually helping others to be at all odd, considering
the following quote by Roy Lessin:
“There is a
Warrior protecting you... (Exodus
15:3, Isaiah
42:13, Zephaniah
3:17)
A Shepherd
directing you... (Isaiah
40:11, Psalm
79:13, John
10:11)
A Savior keeping
you...
(Isaiah
45:21-22, 2
Samuel 22:2-3, 1
Timothy 1:15)
A Priest blessing
you...
(Hebrews
4:14-15, Leviticus
16:16,34, Hebrews
9:11-14)
When
I consider the warrior essence, my mind can’t help itself in bringing me back
to Christina’s world. It turns out that
the woman in the painting was named, Anna Christina Olson (1893-1968) who was a
lifelong resident of Cushing, Maine and a longtime friend and neighbor of the
artist, Andrew Wyeth. Christina had a degenerative muscular disorder, which
some have identified as polio, that took away her ability to walk by the late
1920s. She chose to forgo a wheelchair
and instead, crawl around her house and grounds, which currently exists as a
historical landmark that can be visited and explored. Wyeth has said that his
inspiration for the painting came from watching Christina picking blueberries
while crawling through her fields “like a
crab on a new England shore.” He wrote, “The
challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which
most people would consider hopeless. If in some small way, I have been able, in
paint, to make the viewer sense that her world may be limited physically, but
by no means spiritually, then I have achieved what I set out to do.”
Christina
is a warrior because even though that she was dealt to what appears to be a
death-blow by life, leaving her in many ways physically helpless, she did not
permit this to tempt her to unwittingly discard her own inner hope, thus
leaving her even further spiritually crippled by an overwhelming sense of
hopelessness. Rather than permit herself to remain conquered by her
circumstances, she still actively chose to walk the way of a warrior in
fighting to conquer those seemingly insurmountable circumstances and live a
life of victory, even if meant looking forward and crawling on the ground,
getting her hands, clothes, and body all bruised and dirty in order to get
wherever she either needed or wanted to go!!
Life
will sometimes blindside us, leaving us feeling both, totally helpless and
hopeless. Yet, we need to remember that our emotions are just that,
emotions. They do give us important
information to consider when we make our decisions, yet they shouldn’t ever be
permitted to control that decision making process as they can lead us into sin
and death as it did to the first man to indisputably possess a belly-button,
Cain, firstborn son of Adam and Eve. He even had the benefit of the counsel of
God Himself, as he was struggling with feelings of anger directed towards his
brother Abel. Despite the wise counsel and warning of Our Holy Father God,
being instructed to rule over his emotions in order to not be mastered by sin,
Cain threw away his hope in the Lord’s favor and assistance and was left helpless to
stop himself from being a slave to sin as he engaged in a premeditated murder
of his innocent brother Abel.
When
we ourselves get dealt something that appears to be a death-blow by life, we
get brought to a place of decision. Despite our own physical helplessness to
either avoid or alter our current circumstances, will we let our physical
emotions have total control over our spiritual dilemma and thus unwittingly
fall to the temptation to abandon and throw away our spiritual asset of hope, thus
completely crippling ourselves and dishonoring our loving Father who has
already planned and accounted for the present evil to somehow eternally bring
him eternal glorification and bring us eternal blessing (Isaiah
48)? After all, we disciples of
Christ need to always remember that despite our apparent physical helplessness
we never have any reason to harbor any degree of spiritual hopelessness. For we
are more than conquerors (Romans
8:37-38) blessed with grace upon grace (John
1:16) by Almighty God, who loved us enough to give us his only Son (John
3:16) and bless us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in heaven (Ephesians
1:3) in order to deal with any and all of life’s problems, challenges, and
tragedies. Even though we may be nothing more than weak jars of clay (2Corithians
4:7-12), the worst that life can dish out is nothing more than what the
Holy Spirit calls light and momentary afflictions that are preparing an eternal
weight of glory that won’t waste away like we ourselves do (2Corithians
4:16-18)!!
Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) said it best, “We are always in the forge, or on the
anvil. By trials, God is shaping us for nobler things. No physician ever
weighed out medicine to his patients with half so much care and exactness, as
God weighs out to us every trial. Not one grain too much does He ever permit to
be put in the scale!”
So let us not let the flames of trials
burn our souls into ashes of anger, apathy, and depression that will be blown
away in the winds of adversity, but rather let us take the way of the warrior
and permit our souls to be forged by God who will use these very same fires to transform
our souls to transcend our circumstances like a mythological Phoenix obtains
new life by arising from the ashes of its predecessor.
All this contemplation and talk about the essence and way of
the warrior helps me to now see one of
our famous forerunners of the Christian faith, John Wesley, in a whole new light as being a warrior as I
recall his following quote: “Do all the
good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, at all the
times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”
For more:
CORAM DEO
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