News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Sisters artist and author Lisa May shows a digital art piece that is featured in her new book.
Lisa May has experienced profound loss, and suffering so acute that it made her question her close-held faith. Seeking to make sense of it all — and to find ways to help others — sent the Sisters artist down a path that has led to a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign to produce her book “Transformed by God’s Nature: Finding Hope In God’s Character In The Midst Of Suffering.”
“Honestly, what I did, I spent the last months of 2016 doing a lot of searching about what I should do with all I’ve been through,” she told The Nugget.
May describes her crisis of faith in her Kickstarter narrative:
“My heart broke with the question that threatened my faith: ‘How do I know that God is good when my life is not?’ I had served God, and it seemed that He had failed me. But I knew in the deepest parts of my soul that if I couldn’t find answers in the Bible, I wouldn’t find them anywhere else.”
Transformed By God’s Nature is crafted as a daily devotional. As May’s Kickstarter narrative states:
“Each week focuses on one of God’s attributes. At every turn, artistic renderings of His creation extend the message and opportunity to reflect. Transformed by God’s Nature is uniquely crafted through study of God’s authoritative Word and recognition of how He shows Himself in Creation — honoring two key ways God has chosen to reveal himself. Action steps give readers further opportunity to pause and worship, as well as to grow in resemblance to Jesus Christ in the attributes He shares with us.”
She finds the format conducive to learning and reflection, offering readers “small chunks that someone could sit down and read each day… It’s so comfortable to read and to learn that way.”
May had already been exploring the themes that would inform her book in journals, and “as I started writing, it really started to click.”
May chose to bring her visual arts background into the creation of the book. From 2012 to 2014, she had been actively involved in producing artwork in a technique she calls “paper layering.” It’s a time-consuming process, and by the time she started on the book, she wasn’t actively working in the medium. But she discovered a means of producing the same type of effect digitally in a much more time-expedient manner, and thus began to illustrate her writing with her original work.
Transformed by God’s Nature is a 23-week study on God’s character, based on a close study of Scripture, with each week focusing on a particular attribute.
“Each attribute has an illustration,” May explained.
All of those illustrations are available to Kickstarter patrons as fine art prints. They can be viewed at May’s self-publishing website, www.logbridgebooks.com.
The path to completion of the book has been long, and involved “mostly just learning an incredible amount about the Bible and who God is.” May had been an ardent student of the Bible since she was a teenager, but the process of creating the book revealed depths that she had not yet plumbed.
“If you’d have asked me 10 years ago, I would have said I’m kind of an expert,” she said. “But not so.”
May’s fundraising goal is $20,000. She believes the work will help people in times that try their souls. As she states in her narrative:
“I learned that when life is painful, confusing, and unpredictable, God’s unchanging character can be a relief — if you know Him for who He has revealed Himself to be. But when my understanding of God was inaccurate, then suffering left my faith on shaky ground. It took years of study in the Bible to find a firm foundation of trust in God that was not shaken in the most difficult circumstances. We are all facing great challenges with the current coronavirus pandemic and there is widespread need to find rest in the God of all comfort.”
May has felt guidance all along the long and challenging creative path.
“I have seen God walk me through this,” she told The Nugget. “There is no doubt that this is what He wanted me to do. To what end, I don’t know.”
May’s Kickstarter can be accessed at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lisamay/transformed-by-gods-nature. For more information visit www.logbridgebooks.com.
Lisa May is an employee of The Nugget Newspaper.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
Reader Comments(0)