During the summer, we’re going through a sermon series on the Fruit of the Spirit together. Each week focuses on a specific fruit — looking at the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
We’re also asking specific artists in our church to reflect, pray, and meditate on a fruit and then express their creativity through that word. The creative forms could be paintings, glasswork, pottery, music, poetry, or anything else that speaks to them.
During this week’s sermon, we talked about GOODNESS as a Fruit of the Spirit. The artist, Aubrey Brady, expressed her creativity through a painting and a poem.
“Goodness” feels both vague and loaded, but three different points kept pulling at my attention, and so the poem I wrote is in three parts.
The first is about the dichotomy between “being good” and goodness.
The second part is about how goodness isn’t always easy to accept. In the research I was doing on goodness I kept reading about how goodness was active kindness, but how it was of the sort that isn’t always what we might consider “nice” (such as Jesus showing goodness when clearing the temple).
The third part is just about the nourishing tastiness of goodness. The third dictionary definition of goodness is just that: “the nutritious, flavorful, or beneficial part of something.”
All involve rain as a sign of the abundance of goodness. Rain as a sign of abundance was definitely written at the beginning of the summer, probably a very northwest sign of abundance. Abundant rain is also to show the idea of the overflowing nature of
God’s goodness and how we show goodness via the overflow of goodness in our lives. The painting, also, is a working out of the idea of how we receive and give goodness, by holding out our hands and letting it overflow.
I kept coming back to Psalm 23 as I thought about goodness. Reading it from the perspective of the end which says: “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life,” it feels like an explanation of what a life filled with goodness and mercy looks like.
AUBREY BRADY
Artist
We also encourage YOU to create your own art during this Fruit of the Spirit series! Prayerfully consider one of the fruit words and then see how the Holy Spirit moves within you to create.
If you create artwork, we would love to see it and share it with others! Send us an email with your artwork attached.