A World Too Small

My wife and I grew up in evangelical/fundamentalist Christian churches in which we were constantly pummeled with verses like 1 John 2:15 ("Love not the world!") ... that's the topic on the sign on the front of the church in the painting: "This Week's Sermon: Love Not The World".

But guess what is an even more favorite verse of Fundamentalists? John 3:16 (same author, I cannot help but note). It begins: "For God so loved the world..."

I was regularly told not to be worldly, and sometimes that I WAS worldly; it was a big insult.

So, when I was coming out of evangelicalism/ fundamentalism into Anglicanism, around the same time I realized the apparent contradiction between these two verses -- Why is God allowed to love the world, but we are not?

Once our heads were exploded by that "paradox", we realized that the churches we had grown up in were "A World Too Small" for us to inhabit any more.

When I wanted to paint this experience of ours, I thought: "What if I made a church-going lady ACTUALLY become too large for her old church (or old worldview) to contain her?" That's when I came up with this idea of a giant lady popping out of a church.

She is reaching toward heaven, and living a life too large to be contained within that old, narrow worldview

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Oil on Canvas – 72”H x 50”W - UNFINISHED

 

($200, unframed)