Mercy

"The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy."

Psalm 103:8

"Mercy for others will reveal your ongoing need for mercy, driving you to the end of yourself and into the arms of your merciful Savior." - Paul David Tripp, New Morning Mercies

In all honesty, I had a completely different topic picked out for today's blog post. But then my devotional covered the topic of mercy, my Sunday School class was on the topic of mercy, and my pastor preached on mercy in his Sunday evening sermon. You think just *maybe* God's trying to tell me something? 

To be completely transparent with you, I have not felt very merciful these last couple weeks. Not. At. All. People have been hurtful and unkind to me and my family and my first response is to immediately give them a piece of my mind. You feel me? After all, it's wrong and they need to know it! But then I have to stop. Just stop. Think. Take a deep breath. Pray. And remember the mercy that God has given me each and every day. 

"Let thy mercies come also unto me, O Lord, even thy salvation, according to they word. So shall I have wherewith to answer him that reproacheth me: for I trust in thy word."

Psalm 119:41-42

God has a plan for me to live in freedom and liberty (read down to verse 45), and that plan includes my living in mercy so I can give mercy. If I don't have a plan for living in and giving mercy, I will live in a state of perpetual irritation - being hurt and offended by everyone and everything that slights me in any way. I don't know about you, but that is not how I want to live.

I love this excerpt from Paul David Tripp's New Morning Mercies devotional:

"We celebrate God's mercy but scream at our children when they mess up. We sing of amazing grace but punish our spouses with silence when they offend us. We praise God for his love but forsake a friendship because someone has been momentarily disloyal. We are thankful that we've been forgiven but say that a person who is suffering the result of his decisions is getting what he deserves. We bask in God's grace but throw the law at others. We're simply not that good at mercy because we tend to see ourselves as more deserving than the poor and needy."

Ouch. That hits where it hurts. God has granted me mercy and wants me to extend that same mercy to others; and when I show mercy to the people or situations that hurt or offend me, I grow (II Peter 3:18). 🎕

This week, I am praying for God's mercy to be real to me, not just for me, but so that I can share mercy with others and ultimately point them back to a loving, merciful God.

Page Details

If you know me, you know I love doing anything and everything with Distress Oxides. They are my go-to medium for all art pages! This page was especially fun because it was a beautiful mixed media disaster (kinda like me, haha). 😉 I used a 5" x 7" art journal I received as a gift at a recent retreat. Here is my step-by-step process:

1. I did put down a couple layers of Diane Wakley Clear Gesso on the page before starting my art. I used to never use gesso, but then I watched a great video by Colleen on whether or not to gesso with Distress Oxides (watch the video here) and have been gessoing ever since. I really like how the water reacts on the page when I gesso. Definitely creates more of an effect. 
2. I used a blending tool to blend two colors of Distress Oxides randomly on my page: Seedless Preserves and Peacock Feathers. I work fast when I do this! I get a bunch of ink on my blending tool and then swirl around on the page. Since this is messy page, I wasn't worried about actually blending the colors together - just about getting them down on the page. 
3. As soon as I had my base color down, I spritzed the page with my Tim Holtz Distress Sprayer. I like to get big droplets of water on the page and then tilt the page around to get runny water splotches. 
4. I used my heat dryer to dry my current progress. 
5. I then pulled out my brand, new Distress Ink Spray and sprayed some splotches on the page. This is the first time I've ever used Distress Spray and it was fun, but it's definitely going to take some practice. 😉 I did like how it reacted on my page, but since I had gessoed the page, it took a bit longer to dry. So be aware of that.
6. Dry again.
7. I smooshed the Seedless Preserves Distress Oxides down on my plastic page background, grabbed a paint brush, dipped it in water, and made my own little DIY watercolor with the smooshed oxides and splattered it all over the page. This added some purple splatters to go along with the blue splatters. 
8. Dry again.
9. I then used texture paste and stencils to created some flowers on the page corners. I smooshed down my Distress Oxides in Shaded Lilac (I wanted to add a different purple color for dimension) on my plastic page background, mixed a little bit of glitter acrylic paint that I picked up at Michael's, and texture paste to create a light purpley, glittery texture. I then very thinly spread that over my stencils where I wanted my flowers to go. 
10. Dry again. 
11. I then stamped down my images and title using the new Dragonfly Dreams, Loop da Loop, and Texture Tiles 5 stamp sets from Sweet 'n Sassy Stamps. I love these sets! I used Versafine Black Ink to stamp the images. I have found that this ink gives me the best images when I'm doing stamping, but be careful not to smudge the stamp when you are stamping on gesso!
12. Dry again.
13. I filled in some of the stamped hearts with my white gel pen to add a bit more dimension. 
14. Added a few small strips of coordinating color washi tape.
15. Wrote my devotional note.
16. Date stamped (always date stamp!!).
17. Made sure everything is dry again. 
18. FINISHED!

All in all, this page took almost an hour to do just because of all the layers and I was working with new mediums but, boy, was it FUN! I would highly encourage you to do something similar. This kind of messy art is therapeutic to me. In fact, how would you feel about me creating a video with this process? It won't be anything you haven't seen before with some other mixed media pros, but it could be fun to make an art mess together. What do you think? Leave me a comment if you'd like me to do a live video and journal together!! 😊

Thanks for hanging out with me today. I hope you are reminded to show mercy to the people in your life today. For further encouragement, take a moment and read Psalm 103. 💜

Much love in Christ, 

Janelle

@journalingjoy

Here are the stamp sets I used to create this page: