Intricate Patterns

This week is Spring Break around our house. It doesn’t feel like spring outside. It’s still only in the 40’s, but the sun is shining and that makes it look like spring. Usually, we would do something special during this week like take a trip. With it being so early in the spring this year, and the weather not cooperating, we decided to stay home. Instead we are doing some day trips and otherwise keeping to our regular schedule.

On Tuesday we went to the new art museum at Michigan State University. That was interesting. Most of the art is of the modern variety. I especially liked the exhibit called Patterns. The artwork in this exhibit included designs made with string or fish wire pulled across pins. Several were done using only straight lines of wire pulled between pins organized in circles. The resulting patterns made the overall pictures into circles. It also appeared to create texture due to the resulting shadows. Pretty amazing.

As I think about the straight lines creating a circular pattern, I see my life that way, too. As I’m busy going from point A to point B, my life can seem kind of boring and straight. However, the resulting pattern others may see may actually be of curves and circles, not nearly as boring as the pattern I see before me. Sometimes things are not as we see them. Sometimes, doing the little things in our lives that seem boring or straight really yields a beautiful piece of artwork, a complicated mosaic on display for others to see.

That’s how I want my life to be. I want to do the basic, simple things each day but produce great masterpieces of a life well lived. Maybe that’s what my life actually is. Me doing the simple things that turn into something beautiful as the simple patterns are repeated over and over again. That’s how I see other people’s lives. They do the simple things and I see the intricately woven patterns of their lives, beautiful pictures made up of the ordinary actions of each day. Each life is turned into a masterpiece as intricate as those fish wire designs in the museum.