What If the Picture Hasn’t Changed—but the Way You See It Has?
Have you ever lost someone you loved and wished you could have just one more conversation with them? Perhaps there are questions you never thought to ask while they were alive—questions that only emerged years later.
As an adult, I sometimes wish I could sit down with my grandpa and ask him about some of the drawings he left behind. Among the things he left his children was a notebook filled with small drawings. To me, they look almost like designs or samples for labels or stickers. Each one has its own distinctive frame surrounding an empty space—perhaps intended for a recipient’s name and address, or perhaps for something entirely different. I don't know.
And that is precisely what makes them so intriguing to me.
When I began my own creative journey, I found myself thinking about those drawings more often. I wondered whether my grandpa experienced inspiration in the way I do. Did ideas suddenly appear in his mind? Did he see something ordinary and feel compelled to transform it into something creative? What did those little drawings mean to him? And did he ever imagine that, years later, one of his descendants would still be looking at them and wondering about the person who created them?
Recently, those questions returned in an unexpected way. I was working on my painting Soak: Room of Transformation when I felt inspired to create a frame around it.
Something surprising happened. The painting itself had not changed. But the way I saw it had. Suddenly, Soak: Room of Transformation carried another message for me:
Reframe Your Thinking.
The painting is still moving through its own creative process. Its current condition reflects different stages of becoming rather than a perfectly resolved final image. Perhaps that is why it speaks so strongly to me about transformation.
If you are walking through your own season of metamorphosis, you may recognize something of yourself in its unfinished state.
Reframe Your Thinking
Sometimes the situation does not change.
The frame does.
When I look at the painting, my eyes are naturally drawn to the butterfly. It appears to be emerging from darkness, surrounded by layers of violet, white and gold—scratches, marks and traces of everything that came before. But there is another element that could easily be overlooked: the frame.
A frame does not change the painting itself. Yet it influences the way we see everything inside it. Our thoughts can work in much the same way.
We may look at a difficult season and frame it as wasted time.
We may look at a closed door and frame it as failure.
We may look at uncertainty and call it being lost.
We may look at our imperfections and conclude that something has gone wrong.
But what if the picture has not yet been fully revealed?
Perhaps transformation often looks messy, unclear and incomplete when we are experiencing it from the inside. We celebrate the butterfly after its wings have opened, but rarely admire the confusing space between what it was and what it is becoming.
Perhaps that is exactly where reframing becomes important.
Instead of asking, “Why am I still here?” we might ask, “What is being formed here?”
Instead of, “Why didn't this work?” perhaps, “What did this reveal?”
Instead of, “Why am I starting again?” perhaps, “What can I see now that I couldn't see before?”
The circumstances may be exactly the same.
But the frame has changed.
The Bible speaks about this kind of inner transformation:
“Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” — Romans 12:2
Reframing is not denial. It does not require us to pretend that something painful is pleasant, that disappointment does not hurt, or that every difficult experience has an obvious explanation. Sometimes reframing simply means refusing to allow one interpretation to become the entire story.
Near the bottom of the painting are several small flowers. They could easily disappear beneath the much larger butterfly, yet they remain. That small detail makes me wonder whether transformation is not always about leaving everything behind.
Perhaps some things are meant to come with us.
A lesson.
A relationship.
A gift discovered in difficulty.
A small piece of beauty we might have overlooked if we had rushed too quickly toward becoming the butterfly.
And perhaps that brings me back to my grandpa's drawings. I may never know what he intended those empty frames to contain. I cannot go back and have the conversation I wish I had been able to have with him. But years later, his frames are still doing something. They are making me look again.
Perhaps that, too, is part of a creative legacy—not simply leaving behind finished answers, but leaving something that helps another person see differently. Maybe today you don't need a completely different life. Maybe you need to look again at the life already in front of you.
What might change if you stopped asking God to change the picture—and allowed Him to change the frame through which you see it?
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