Visual Art Interpretation – My Hopes and Dreams for the Next Year
I began with an idea of drawing my age and it gradually morphed into a radiant, hand-made number filled not so much with tasks to accomplish as with the people, callings, loves, and practices that give me joy.
The bright red border and repeated golden lights give it the appearance of a theater sign or a carnival ride. They are a remnant of posters I used to make when I was a boy. Inside that celebratory outline, the words curve, turn, reverse, overlap, and require the eye to travel.
The words I placed inside my age—Sing, Play, Memories, God, Laugh, Journey, Pastor, Author, Husband, PeaceGrooves, Friends, Art, Church, Love, Woodcraft—are striking to me because so many of them are relational or creative. Author is near Husband. Pastor winds along the same road as Journey. PeaceGrooves circles alongside Friends, Church, and Love.
The Word I Did Not Write
After finishing the piece, I realized that I did not write health or healing anywhere inside it. Those things matter deeply to me, especially in light of some of the recent physical concerns and uncertainties I have been carrying. And yet, perhaps their absence does not mean they were forgotten. Perhaps I instinctively wrote the life I hope healing will allow me to continue inhabiting.
I did not write healing, but I wrote Sing-Play: the hope that my body and spirit can still release themselves into music.
I wrote Laugh: the hope for lightness, delight, and joy.
I wrote Journey: the hope that I can continue moving forward.
I wrote Husband and Friends: the hope of remaining present in love and relationship rather than retreating into worry or isolation.
I wrote Pastor and Church: the hope that I can continue serving meaningfully among people.
I wrote Art, Author, Woodcraft, and PeaceGrooves: the hope that creativity will continue flowing through me rather than being swallowed up by discouragement, exhaustion, or fear.
Perhaps healing is everywhere in this drawing without being visible. It is hidden beneath almost every word: Let me be wekHzll enough, free enough, encouraged enough, and alive enough to keep inhabiting these loves.
But perhaps the omission also tells me something tender and difficult about myself. When I think about the future, I often think first about what I can give, create, serve, love, and build. I may not always think first about what I need. This picture invites me to remember that somewhere in the glowing year ahead, there must also be room for my own care. I am not only the husband, pastor, artist, author, musician, friend, and creator. I am also a person who needs healing, rest, gentleness, and grace.
The Smear Between Author and Husband
One of the small accidents in the piece occurred in the space between Author and Husband. Water smeared the color there, and I had to cover it as best I could. I was mostly able to hide the mistake, though I know it happened.
That accidental smear now feels strangely meaningful. Author and Husband are two of my most intimate identities: the part of me that creates worlds and gives language to inner experience, and the part of me that shares an actual life in love and covenant with another person. Perhaps those two identities were never meant to be sharply separated. My writing rises from my lived relationships, from tenderness, memory, fear, faith, longing, disappointment, and love. And my creative life inevitably spills into the life I share with my wife.
The water touched the border between those words, and I tried to repair it. That is not a failure of the picture. It may be one of the most honest parts of it. Life does not remain perfectly inside the lines. The roles I care most about do not remain untouched by mess, vulnerability, or accident. Sometimes the colors run together. Sometimes I try to cover what went wrong. Sometimes a trace remains, visible mostly to me.
Yet I did not throw the picture away. I continued working on it. I allowed the imperfection to dry and become part of the finished whole.
Perhaps that is an image of grace. A life of grace is not a life where nothing ever gets smeared. It is a life in which even the smeared places can be incorporated into the beauty.
Church: Almost Illegible
I also noticed that Church almost looks like “Churgh.” It is there, but it is not the clearest or most immediately readable word. That, too, feels symbolic.
Church is deeply present in my hopes for the coming year. It is part of who I am, part of my calling, part of my relationship with God and with community. But church is not always simple or perfectly clear. It can be difficult to read. It can be beautiful and messy, life-giving and exhausting, sacred and profoundly human all at once.
In this picture, church does not appear by itself in a clean, isolated space. It is crowded into a circling path alongside other words: Love, Friends, Art, the movements of creativity and ministry surrounding it. That seems truthful. For me, church is not separate from love, friendship, art, imagination, service, or reconciliation. It is beautifully entangled with them.
The fact that the word may be hard to dicipher signifies that church is something I continue to believe in and belong to, though at times, it may be difficult to see clearly its formation.
The Shape of the Year
The large number itself is not simply filled in. It becomes a winding course. The words curve around turns and corners; some appear upright from one angle and upside down from another. To read the whole image, I almost have to rotate it, follow it, and let my eyes travel through it.
I do not know exactly how it will unfold. My hopes do not form a straight road or a neatly numbered plan. They form a brightly lit labyrinth. Something that appears upside down from one position may look different once I travel farther along the curve. Something that seems peripheral now may become central. Something disappointing may redirect me toward an unexpected opening.
This drawing does not say, Here is my plan to master the next year.
It says, Here is the glowing path I hope to traverse.
Music feeds ministry. Woodcraft feeds contemplation. Writing feeds faith. PeaceGrooves gathers together my imagination, my longing for peace, my love of play, and my desire to offer something meaningful to others. Marriage and friendship keep my creative life from becoming merely solitary. Church places my personal dreams within a larger body. God is not outside all these things, looking down upon them from a distance, but present among them.
My life is not a ladder climbing toward a single success. It is a winding, illuminated journey through many loves.
The Lights Around the Border
The repeated yellow bulbs around the border give the piece a vintage, celebratory feeling. They make the year look like something grounded in the past yet being announced: a show beginning, a stage opening, a bright invitation to enter.
There is something almost exuberant about it. I did not draw a quiet little calendar page or a restrained list of intentions. I drew my age as a symbol of hope. Music, laughter, love, friendship, art, faith, craft, writing, church, PeaceGrooves—these are not hobbies or decorative extras around the edge of life. They are among the things that make life worth living.
And yet the lights are not machine-perfect. They are hand-drawn. Each one is slightly different. Some are rounder, some rougher, some more irregular. The brightness of this coming year is not a slick commercial promise that everything will be perfect. It is the brightness I have carefully drawn around my hopes with my own imperfect hand.
The lights continue around the bends. They do not shine only along the smooth or impressive stretches. They follow the narrow turns, the dips, the places where the shape curls inward. The light does not abandon the complicated places.
What This Picture Says to Me
This is a picture of my hope not merely to survive another year but to remain fully myself within it.
I want to sing and play.
I want to laugh.
I want to remember.
I want to journey.
I want to love and be loved.
I want to remain a husband, a pastor, an author, an artist, a craftsman, a musician, a friend, and a dreamer.
I want PeaceGrooves not merely to exist as a project, but to become an expression of something deep within me: my longing to imagine, create, and make peace.
I want God not as an abstract religious idea floating somewhere outside my life but as a living presence woven among music, love, creativity, friendship, church, memory, laughter, and journey.
And perhaps beneath the entire picture is the word I did not write: wholeness.
Wholeness includes health. It includes healing. But it is larger than both. It is the hope that all these different names for myself will not compete with one another, break apart, or fade away, but somehow curve together into a single radiant life.
The smear between Author and Husband, the almost-illegible Church, the reversed words, the crowded pathways, the uneven bulbs, and the wandering design do not lessen the picture. They make it more honest.
My hopes for the next year are not cleanly arranged or perfectly protected from mistakes. They are handmade. They are entangled. They are vulnerable. They are colorful. They are imperfect.
And, Oh Yes!, they are still shining.
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