God's Masterpiece

Anna Mary Robertson was one of 10 children who grew up on a small farm in New York.  Money was pretty scarce on the Robertson farm, so when Anna Mary was 12 her parents hired her out to work on another farm. This sounds like a tough thing to do to a 12 year old, but it was pretty common back in that day. 

When she was in her 20's Anna Mary married a man who was hired to work on the same farm. They moved to Virginia, took up farming in the Shenandoah Valley and raised 5 children.  They had had 10 children, but five of them died at birth. 

After 20 years in Virginia, the Robertsons moved back to New York where they continued farming until Thomas died of a heart attack in 1927.  With the help of her son, Forest, Anna Mary continued to run the farm until she was in her 70's. After stepping away from the farm, she took up embroidery to fill her spare time, but arthritis made it difficult for her to hold the embroidery needles.  Her daughter-in-law persuaded her to try painting.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses was 76 years old when she discovered her passion for painting.  Over the next 25 years she completed 1600 paintings before her death at the age of 101.  

A few years after starting to paint, Louis Caldor, an art collector from New York City saw some of her paintings in the window of a drug store in Hoosick Falls, New York.  He bought the paintings and took them back to New York City where they were displayed in New York's Museum of Modern Art.  Grandma Moses, as she became know, became an overnight sensation.  In 2006, one of her paintings sold for 1.6 million dollars.  Not bad for someone who had no formal training and had spent most of her life doing farm chores.

Who would have imaged this outcome for her life?  Who? The who had designed, equipped and created her!  God created Anna Mary Robertson Moses with a passion for beauty and all of the talents she would ever need to express her passion.  It just too a while for her to discover what God had created her to do.

Each of us is a unique, one of a kind, custom designed child of God, designed with artistic genius and created with great love.  Look at how the psalmist describes the careful detail God puts into each masterpiece he creates:

You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother's womb.  Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!  Your workmanship is marvelous -- how well I know it.  You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I I was woven together in the dark of the womb.  You saw me before I was born.  Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed. (Psalm 139:13-16)