The Garden He Refused to Leave

When Claude Monet was in his seventies, cataracts began stealing his sight. The man who had spent a lifetime chasing light across haystacks and cathedrals could no longer trust the colors he saw. His blues turned muddy. His greens went brown. He slashed canvases in frustration and burned others in his garden at Giverny.

Any reasonable person would have set down the brush. Monet did not.

For over a decade, through failing eyes, through the death of his wife Alice and his son Jean, through the thunder of World War I rumbling just fifty miles from his studio, Monet kept painting his water lilies. He worked on enormous canvases — some over six feet tall and forty feet wide — layering color upon color, painting not what his damaged eyes saw but what his spirit knew was there. He endured cataract surgery in 1923 and returned to the easel yet again.

The result was the vast Water Lilies cycle now housed at the Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris — panels so luminous that visitors often weep standing before them.

The Apostle Paul wrote, "We do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day." Monet's body was failing, but something deeper kept his hand moving. The same is true for every believer who perseveres through seasons of dimness. The Almighty does not ask us to see the finished masterpiece. He asks us to keep painting.