The Garden He Could Barely See

In 1912, Claude Monet received a diagnosis that should have ended his career. Cataracts were clouding both eyes, slowly stealing the one thing a painter needs most — his sight. The gardens at Giverny, the water lilies he had spent decades cultivating and capturing on canvas, were dissolving into muddy shapes and distorted colors.

He could have stopped. No one would have blamed a man in his seventies for setting down his brushes. Instead, Monet kept painting. He labeled his tubes of paint so he could identify colors by position rather than sight. He slashed canvases that frustrated him, then started again the next morning. For over a decade, he worked on his massive water lily murals — the Grandes Decorations — commissioned for the Orangerie in Paris. Some days, he wept at what he could no longer see clearly. But he never stopped showing up at his easel.

Those late paintings, created through failing eyes and stubborn faith in the work, are now considered among his greatest masterpieces. Art critics say they anticipated abstract expressionism by a generation.

The apostle Paul wrote, "We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen" (2 Corinthians 4:18). Sometimes perseverance means continuing the work God has placed before us even when we cannot see the outcome clearly. The masterpiece is not ours to judge. It is ours to faithfully create.