Painters can express their innermost feelings in a canvass.  A bowl of fruits can be viewed and painted differently – depending on the painter’s perspective. Painting is a challenging profession or hobby. Not many get into it. 

Yet all people can be painters in the Canvass of Life. Every morning when we wake up, we are handed a canvass, an easel, a set of brush and tubes of paints of various colors. We don’t need to know the techniques of painting. We don’t even need a subject. The choice of color is up to us. We can choose happy colors like yellow, pink and green, or the calming colors of blue. But we can also settle for black, brown, or gray. It all depends on our mood. 

We can put colorful dots of laughter or black dots of complaints on our canvass. We can create solid lines of kind words or different layers of hurtful remarks. As the sun sets, a scene slowly unfolds – a scene of happiness or a landscape of sadness. Lastly, we can frame our painting with love or hatred. 

Covid-19 handed down to us a gray canvass. But we can bury the gray with a coat of white. We can paint a garden, even a sunrise or a seascape. In this time of difficulty, we can choose to be angry and sprinkle our day with complaints. But we can also choose to submit to authorities and most of all to our God who knows what He is doing. And as we pray and wait, we are painting our day yellow. 

“But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be wary, they shall walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:31).