Ever since I was little I have loved chicken. Truly loved. As in I ate it so much my parents were convinced I was going to sprout wings. What did you expect? I’m from the south.
So I’m sure you aren’t surprised to hear that my favorite place to eat is none other than, Chick-fil-A. I’m sure the closest location to us in Daphne, Alabama probably knew me and my order before the age of 4. It’s fine.
I just connect with it on a spiritual level.
(I’m convinced there’s a Chick-fil-A in heaven. There just is.)
Let me just get across that the point of all of this is not so I can advertise Chick-fil-A.
(But on a side note, it’s darn good... if I didn’t already make myself clear).
My theory is that we all have our quirks—things that we have grown up doing, saying, or in my case eating. These “things” can take the form of a hobby or a passion that we may have neglected or didn’t quite know how to approach when we were younger. But sometimes, God brings these things back into our lives in funny little ways we didn’t expect.
For example, if you had asked me ten years ago what I thought my life was going to look like, and then told me what was actually going to happen, I would have said you were insane. As far as I knew, I was going to attend Bayshore Christian School until graduation, and from there I was headed to Auburn.
Good and simple.
Done.
Except not done.
Remember when I said God can be funny?
Yeah. Ha. Ha.
Never did I ever dream of leaving my sweet fairytale of a town, Fairhope, Alabama, for none other than hillbilly headquarters.
Otherwise known as Knoxville, Tennessee.
Yet all the same God ended up meeting me there. I met some of my dearest friends and it really ended up being a second home for me, which made it even harder to leave six years later to go back to (you guessed it) Alabama.
But not Fairhope.
Birmingham.
Really God you’re hilarious.
Please start a stand up comedy show or something.
Even so, some of the pieces of my life started falling back into place.
I started seeing the little ways that God was working.
He started bringing the little things back into my life.
He reunited me with my very first art teacher from Bayshore in Fairhope whom I love dearly. She ended up being the catalyst in my art career that I truly needed to push my talent where I didn’t know it could go. I truly think I grew more in my art in the last three years of high school than all six years in Knoxville combined. Sometimes all you need is someone to push you.
I created some of my best pieces in high school under her instruction.
My sophomore year I experimented with mediums I would not proudly call my forté at the time, but I ended up throwing my everything into them all the same.
“Oil painting”
This piece was inspired from a sunset picture that was taken at our sweet Cotton Bayou beach house in Orange Beach, Alabama. It was truly the turning point in my art career. It’s when I decided I wanted my art to go deeper than the surface level.
I want to make people feel something more— to stir something inside them they may not even known is there until they feel it. Cotton Bayou carries so many memories and charisma for me that I knew I had to share it by bringing it alive through my art.
I also tried two things that equally terrified me at the time: “pastels” and “portraits”.
This “pastel portrait” of the war hero Louis Zamperini was the first portrait that I would say was an actual success. I think I just find people to be so intricate and detailed that it seems almost impossible to reciprocate them on a canvas. I almost feel like I’m trying to play copycat with God’s work... hey imitation is the best form of flattery right?
Another thing he brought into my life was the desire to travel.
My Junior year is when my art class created a mural piece depicting the gospel and it ended up being the first “traveling art exhibit” Briarwood has ever had!
New Zealand has always been on my bucket list of places I want to go, but not until my art beat me there did I really pursue the possibility of going. The mural was commissioned to stay at a local school in Auckland for 2 weeks. As I thought about how many people it could be impacting I wondered if God would ever lead me in the same direction.
Little did I know what God had in store for me only a year later.
The true point where I resolved to take a GAP year was when I became interested in the WinShape Program at Berry College in Rome, Georgia. This program is only a part of the WinShape Foundation. This also includes WinShape Camps and WinShape Homes.
And it was all started by none other than Truett Cathy himself, founder of Chick-fil-A.
Which brings me back to the little things. My plan wasn’t to take a GAP year right after high school. I didn’t plan on working at Chick-fil-A. (I was perfectly content being one of their many loving customers)
Nor did I plan on moving “x” number of times to get to where I am now. But the places I’ve been and the people I’ve met have all been apart of shaping me into the person I am today, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. God has been planning this from the very beginning and has gently guided me in the way I should go with no little resistance from me, mind you. So my last word is that if you’re in a place where you have no earthly idea what the heck God is doing and you’re fighting him with it, the best thing you can do is give it up to him. Because he knows something you don’t; and it may be that he is waiting for you to let go so he can fulfill his plan that is always so much better than our own.
So I guess I don’t have anything else to say, except give thanks to the Lord for today.
And Truett Cathy.
“Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.”
Proverbs 19:21