my good friend (and future neighbor) clive staples lewis (i will call him "jack" when we are neighbors) penned this apt description of God as an artist. and us as a painting. a painting that sometimes wishes for less "attention to detail" that God the artist painstakingly and albeit sometimes (most of the time) PAINFULLY puts into His masterpieces... because He loves us too much to let us be anything less than Masterpieces.
We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character…
Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of His life – the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves his God, He will take endless trouble, and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient.
One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scrapped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute.
In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had destined for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny but then we are wishing not for more love, but for less.
C. S. Lewis
the reader. by frank benson (my 2nd favorite artist. God being my 1st favorite.)