The Other Half

Brian Kershisnik, She Will Find What Is Lost

This painting has been swimming around in my consciousness ever since I saw it hanging on a gallery wall at the Springville Museum of Art last year. It floats to the surface from time to time.

When I listen to a friend talk about feeling God's love fill her soul while she was in solitary confinement, grappling for a way to turn her life around. When I visit a friend whose daughter has been in the NICU for seven months, and I ache for her to feel sustained by so many of us who deeply care about her. When I hear a friend call out for someone to talk to when she was at the hospital late one night with her unconscious daughter, who had been hit by a car and left for dead, and I yearn to be with her in her pain so she doesn't have to bear it alone. When I read this post, written by a friend who had always felt the presence of God but inexplicably lost it for a time.

The painting goes straight to the heart of my often still fledgling spiritual journey. It is love that we give and receive that sustains us. It is love that connects us with the divine, in us and around us. The divine itself is light and love. And we are meant to draw on the light to see and the love to transcend.

While I have fervently believed in and have long striven for others to feel this sustenance of love, especially in all of their humanness we see in the light, I have come to the stark realization that I have never actually believed it is for me. I have never felt what I so earnestly hope others feel. I am missing an essential half.

Even though I have seen this Kershisnik painting many times, I didn't notice the title of it until today. She Will Find What Is Lost. Maybe one day I will see that she is me and I can be whole.