02 | March | 2016 | betsybeadhead

What is it like to move to another country?
To leave everything you’ve ever known behind?
What if not only is it another country, but culture?
What if even the language is different?
How would you find your way?
How would you know when you have inadvertently stepped over a line?
As if land were suddenly water, or you must suddenly live in the sky.
Alienating. Fear. Excitement.
Like learning to walk again.
Is this what paraplegics do? Are they unexpectedly immigrants?

(detail)

I found this slip as I was trading cars (always stressful) and while meditating on how I long for community but have a very hard time maintaining it. So many people have violated my trust. The idea of all my ancestors cheering me on came to me just shortly before I found this. It helped validate my message.

Here is the legend from a map used as part of this. I like these – you need a reference point to know what you are looking at.

Here is the definition of the word –
Keyframe
n. a moment that seemed innocuous at the time but ended up marking a diversion into a strange new era of your life—set in motion not by a series of jolting epiphanies but by tiny imperceptible differences between one ordinary day and the next, until entire years of your memory can be compressed into a handful of indelible images—which prevents you from rewinding the past, but allows you to move forward without endless buffering.

Ingredients:
Strathmore visual journal
Glue stick
Magazine photos
Fortune cookie message
The distance key from a map

Created 3-2-16

The pictures were taken with my phone. Maybe I’ll remember to scan this and switch them out. This gives you an idea, at least.

(edit – here are the scanned, and thus brighter, images)

I made this bracelet to illustrate God dwelling among us. This is the picture of the whole thing, which has three units of the same “story”.

Here I’ve blocked off just the story itself. It reads going up.

This is how you read it –
(light green beads) God created the world. God sustained it for thousands of years.

(Deep green small bead)
Then, God said to the Jewish people
“I want to dwell among you”
and the Mishkon,
the traveling tabernacle, was built.
The tangible reminder that a non-tangible presence was among them.
It wasn’t a house for God
so much as a reminder
that God was already present with them.

(Large deep green bead)
Thousands of years passed with Jews following the One God.

Then the Holy Spirit (red bead)
spoke to Mary (blue bead).
God wanted to dwell among us even more intimately.
God took up residence inside Mary.
It wasn’t something forced.
She was asked.
She said “Here I am. I’m your servant.
Do unto me according to your will.”

God took up residence within her and created a pure, holy, being, a blend of past, present and future, fully human, fully Spirit, and the culmination of the Jewish hope. (Bead with green, red, blue, and white)

Never before in human history has God spoken to someone and asked them to make a place for God within themselves. He’d asked plenty to trust and to follow, but never to actually have God dwell within.

When Jesus came into the world, he asks us to do the same – to make a place for God in our hearts, to let God work through us. God is not in a building – God never was. God is here, within us, now.