God the artist.

This is really risky! It's always possible that this Sara & Hagar thing I'm doing will come to nothing, won't be ready on time, won't be accepted.... but I carry on in the knowledge that I'm enjoying doing it, it is good for me etc etc. While I'm whirring away on a machine, I'm always thinking about something, someone, some god, and I'm pondering the idea of God being an artist, and I have two questions.

1) Does God worry, as I do, about waste? Does he think, every time he thinks of Thomas Gray's line' Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air', 'Oh dear! What a waste!' and think of all that beauty in the depths of mines, all those colours of minerals and sparkly gold-speckled stuff. My stash of cloth and threads etc (there's a lot of etc) is composed of stuff that is both newish and donkey's years old. I used to worry about using it up too quickly, running out of stuff, as I'd spent many years being quite hard up, now I worry that it won't get used up before I die, (hoarding is a psychological response life's events, but also necessary for textile people) but then I think that surely some descendant's eyes will light up when told 'have a look through grandma's stuff - she'd want you to have it and use it'. But to produce a tiny bit of embroidery seems to depend on having drawers and drawers of colours of thread and all the scraps of fabric left over from every garment I ever made. Until a week or so ago, I didn't cut into big pieces of cloth, as I tend to save them for clothes, and then only use the scraps left for embroidery; but I've had to change that and think that the small things are so much what I want to do that I might as well cut into a big piece and be damned; but always the fear that that piece will nearly, but not quite, make a skirt after it bit has been snipped off it. But look around in nature, and there isn't any trace if that attitude. God seems to bury a lot of his best creation underground, and we (the descendants?) come along and find some of it and use it for our own purposes. We never make anything from scratch, we only use the things he has left us.


2) If God is an artist, when does he know he has finished a piece? And if this earth is not quite finished, in what activity or events can we see his tinkering? It's tempting to see earthquakes and tsunamis as the activity of a rather careless artist. And how does his I-haven't-finished-yet activity impinge on human relationships? Is he involved in that? 'I haven't quite got them right just yet - need to increase the altruistic level a bit', rather like a kind of edit-in-Photoshop thing. Or has he walked away and left us to make the best of what we are? Perennial theological questions.

Back to Sarah & Hagar. It's rather risky to put any of it here, as it could fail completely and look very naff. But this is Sarah's obit piece, the field of Machpelah, (and a few other bits in the background, including the bit I worry looks like Egyptian fancy dress, rather Gilbert and Sullivanish). I'm hoping it is reminiscent of an English hedgerow. I know there was not an English hedge around the field that Abraham bought, but I'm pretending not to know.