This is a self-portrait by the artist Chuck Close. I don't know his beliefs, but I always think his later paintings illustrate a certain aspect of God when I look at them.

Early in his career, he painted in a Photo Realism style. His skill at detail and exactness was masterful. One of his most famous hangs here in Minneapolis at the MIA.

But in 1988 he suffered a seizure that affected his spine and he became a paraplegic. He had to develop a new way of painting with his limited abilities. With a brush strapped to his hand, he began to paint in small squares. Applying loose blobs of paint, each square was nothing more than a study of value and hue. But with the vision in his mind, Close placed in a grid, those individual abstract squares to create large, engaging portraits.

Together they created a whole. His method of breaking up the complexity of the human face into a grid predated pixelization and digital printing technology. Colorful, beautiful, awe-inspiring paintings were created by an artist who could visualize the big picture even if each smaller square appeared to make no sense.

The comparisons to the Lord’s view of the world is easy. I can only see my small part. Sometimes I can’t understand how I fit in, what God wants from me, or how my life makes the difference in the big picture. But God knows it all, He made me just as he planned. And I trust that He has a plan much bigger than what my small perspective is able to see. 

Jeremiah 29:11
For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.