Āhopian Tō

Closeup Gallery

Poetry

“Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end,
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captivated, and proces weak or untrue,
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.”

-John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14

Scent

In this station, the scent I use to associate with this time in my life is sweet pea. My precious mother had planted the beautiful vine when I was in high school. She purposefully placed it on the side of our house where I could see it from my bedroom windows because my father nicknamed me his Sweet Pea. Whenever I smell this scent, I think about when I was 15 years old and beginning to learn how God saw me — someone with value and worth because he had made me in his image and died for me.

Music

The music I use in this station is the song “It’s Okay” by the band Delirious. This is the song that I heard playing from my sister’s room, which spoke directly to my pain and helped prevent me from taking my own life. The scissors in this piece represent my thoughts of suicide and depression.

Painting

This painting and sensory station tell the story of my struggle with depression as a teenager. I struggled with the desire for acceptance from my peers, with my appearance, with the evils that had been done to me, and with stress at home. I felt alone and thought that if God really loved me, and if a good God really existed, that
he would have made me differently and would not have allowed me to be hurt. One night, in October of 1999, alone and depressed in my bedroom, I seriously contemplated suicide and held my scissors as a weapon. I did not know if
God existed, but I cried out to God for help. In that moment, I heard a song coming from my sister’s bedroom. The words were like a balm for my aching heart:

Take me or leave me, don’t have to believe me. All the words I have to say, all the songs that fly away. Take me or leave me, believe me good will come. It’s OK, you know I’ll live to fight another day. It’s OK, you know I’ll live to find another way. She’s as pretty as hell and her eyes have no home, the beauty has run from your face, such beauty that hung from your face, and if you would drink this wine you’ll shine. It’s OK, you know I’ll live to fight another day. It’s OK, you know I’ll live to find the words to say. It’s OK, you know I’ll live to find another way, and if you would give me holy wine, I’ll shine.

Moved by the words of the song, I turned to the Bible for hope. As I was leafing through the book of 1 Samuel, my eyes fell upon the passage where God tells Samuel that the king he will choose for the Israelites will have a heart after him, “But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him, for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look at the outward appearance but the Lord looks on the heart’” (1 Sam. 16:7). I then recalled something that was said at a Bible study a week prior, that God created us in his image and because of that, we all have inherent value and worth. Then I felt something like a burden lift from me, and I understood that God loved me, that he cared, and he was with me. Not coincidentally, a few weeks later, I attended a concert by the band whose song had cut through to my heart. It was there that I gave my heart to God, to make it new and like his, and accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior.

Because God made us in his image, we have inherent value and worth that can never be taken away. Our struggles and hurts are caused by our own sin or the sin of others, and God allows it because we have also been given free will to choose. To ask God to stop someone from doing evil is to ask that we not have free will to choose. Sadly, we have a warped perception of who we are and our great value, because our souls are corrupted by sin. We were created to reflect God, who is love and goodness, but our sin gets in the way. As much as we try to be perfect on our own, we can only achieve the title of “doer of good deeds,” for our hearts are not always good.

But the good news is that God loved us so much that he came to earth in the form of the historical man, Jesus Christ. Jesus showed us the condition of our hearts, that they were evil and needed to be renewed, and that no matter how hard we try, we cannot do it on our own. We need God’s perfect Holy Spirit within us, helping us to war with our sin nature. So, Jesus was nailed to a Roman cross, died, and was buried in a tomb, and three days later, he physically rose from the dead! Because Jesus (God in human flesh) died for our sins and conquered death (the penalty for our sins), Jesus was able to offer us eternal salvation! When we accept Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross and his resurrection from the dead, we receive God’s Holy Spirit into our hearts. Jesus is the holy wine that washes our souls clean and makes our souls shine with perfection before God’s judgment seat. Praise God for his great love for us!

The illuminated Scripture was the truth that God used from his word to remind me that he cares about the condition of my heart. Previously, I had only thought about the evil in the hearts of those who had hurt me, but not the evil in mine.

The concert tickets and event flyer represent the day I committed my life to Christ. The magazine article about the band Delirious highlights how their art spoke to my desperation and need for hope. And the Chi-Rho symbol inside the gold heart signifies that Christ reigns in my heart.

Thought Prompt

The prompt at this station encourages viewers to look back on their lives and share a time when God may have or did break through into their story. My hope is that this station and thought prompt will help them to see when God has reached out to them.

Closeup Gallery

Prose

      “At first, of course, my attention was caught by my fellow-passengers, who were still grouped about in the neighbourhood of the omnibus, though beginning, some of them, to walk forward into the landscape with hesitating steps. I gasped when I saw them. Now that they were in the light, they were transparent—fully transparent when they stood between me and it, smudgy and imperfectly opaque when they stood in the shadow of some tree. They were in fact ghosts: man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air. One could attend to them or ignore them at will as you do with the dirt on a window pane. I noticed that the grass did not bend under their feet: even the dew drops were not disturbed.

     Then some re-adjustment of the mind or some focussing of my eyes took place, and I saw the whole phenomenon the other way round. The men were as they had always been; as all the men I had known had been perhaps. It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men were ghosts by comparison.”

-C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

Scent

In this station, the scent I use to associate with this time in my life is sweet pea. My precious mother had planted the beautiful vine when I was in high school. She purposefully placed it on the side of our house where I could see it from my bedroom windows because my father nicknamed me his Sweet Pea. Whenever I smell this scent, I think about when I was 15 years old and beginning to learn how God saw me — someone with value and worth because he had made me in his image and died for me.

Music

The music I use in this station is “The Realist Things” by the fabulous indie artist and my friend, Aryn Michelle. This song beautifully captures the idea that there are real things beyond what we experience with the five senses. Faith, hope, and love are just some of the things that we experience in this life that you cannot see, touch, taste, smell, or hear.

Painting

Ever since my Meemaw taught me how to make her delicious apple pie as a child, it has been my favorite pie to make. Once, while researching the best apples for a tart pie, I wondered what made all these apples — each with their different colors, sizes, and flavors — still apples. Further, what made each type of apple different from the others in their own type? I held two different Granny Smith apples in my hands, and although they were the same type of apple, they were different from each other. This trail of thought eventually led me to wonder what makes humans, with all their differences, intrinsically human rather than something else. And further, what made me, me, and not someone else?

I had been a Christian for a few years, so I had come to understand that humans have souls, not just physical bodies, because my thoughts and words were my own, and although I changed physically throughout time, I was still Rachel. But what I didn’t realize at the time was that when I tried to understand what gave humans their “humanness” or apples their “appleness”, was that I was trying to describe “essence.” Years later, when I began to study philosophy and theology, I came across the study of universals and essences. For instance, “humanness” is an essence that humans share, but it is particularized in each person (the soul). These universal essences (i.e., humanness or appleness) are metaphysically abstract entities and are not located in space and time, but their particulars are located in space and time (i.e., my self and Granny Smith apples). Universal essences must exist in order for minds to share the same concepts of apples, humans, and particulars (i.e., Granny Smith apples).

This bolstered my belief in Christianity because it affirms the existence of universals and aligns with the reality that we all live as if universal truths exist. These universal truths have to be grounded in something outside space and time, in an objective source, and that source has to be perfect in order to differentiate between truth and falsity.

Thought Prompt

The prompt at this station encourages viewers to consider things in this life that are real but are not physical and therefore not perceptible to the senses. Things like faith, hope, and love are real things, but we cannot see, taste, touch, hear, or smell them.