I met Ahmad Austin at an InSpero’s Bridge Builders meeting and was struck by his insight and patience as we discussed the deep racial wounds in our city. Then I started following his Instagram and loved his ability to “paint jazz.” His work is filled with joy and color and emotion and the faces he paints are alive with hope.

How will we emerge? That’s the question I’m asking myself and others in this “unprecedented” year. If I tune into the daily news or read the statistics, that question ripples through me with uncertainty and fear. If I lay the uncontrollable “we” down, and focus on me, I can answer. I want to emerge with some “more” in a year filled with “less.”

In the past month, we've attended too many funerals (masks and distancing making it even harder). For an 11-year-old boy who drowned in a creek. For a man who succumbed to suicide leaving a wife and three children. For a mother who died in her sleep five months pregnant. I’m flooded with “it-should-not-be-this-way” raging shouts in my head.

How can we allow Scripture to take hold of us and transform our hearts as well as our minds?

 Lectio Divina (sacred reading), an ancient discipline of the Church, offers a way to slow down and allow the Holy Spirit to lead our experience of Scripture.

Gina is an artist who helps me remember Heaven is coming. Through her life and art she helps me have the courage to long for more, love deeply, weep often, and risk much in this short life we have.

In a recent large group Zoom meeting with Harvard students, I asked them to find two empty containers, labeling one Lost and the other Found. In small groups, we took five minutes silently to write our losses on slips of paper and place them in our Lost jar. We did the same with our Found jar, and then we shared with each other what we wrote—ambiguous loss made tangible.  

I was introduced to the term ambiguous loss—having and not having—after my sixteen-year-old son suffered a brain injury playing football and became severely disabled for life.

My first GPS would say “recalibrating” when I took a wrong turn and reroute me. That’s what I want spiritually—to quickly find out when I’m lost and reorient.

If Wendell Berry were a musician, I think he’d have been Allen Levi. Allen is a man tied to the land and a man who chooses his words and stories with care and compassion. He’s a man who loves Jesus, truly listens to people, and makes beautiful music.

I met Leslie at the magical Laity Lodge at a conference in the summer of 2019. Little did either of us know what the next year would hold. The way she sees, the way she writes about what she sees, and the way she embraces her life and family reminds me of Annie Dillard’s quote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”  

It's my joy that one of my favorite artists, Amy Grimes, is also a friend and neighbor. To take a walk with her is to enter a more hopeful and magical world and see things differently.

Are you trying to find ways to smile this year? Follow Here a Chick, There a Chick on Instagram. Kerry Leasure is an Alabama artist creating mixed media jewelry from antiques, found objects, and a healthy sense of humor.

Now more than ever, we need hope. "A Beauty Refresher" is a window into the world of touching and tasting, smelling and sensing, seeing and reading and hearing hope through artists.