The Painter Who Kept Painting

In the early 1900s, Claude Monet began losing his sight to cataracts. The master of light and color — the man who had taught the world to see haystacks and cathedrals and water lilies in shimmering new ways — was slowly going blind. His paintings grew muddier, the colors shifting toward reds and browns as the disease clouded his perception.

Most artists would have set down the brush. Monet kept painting.

For over a decade, he worked on a series of enormous water lily canvases intended as a gift to France. He painted through frustration, through surgeries, through days when he could barely distinguish one pigment from another. He destroyed canvases in fits of despair and started again. The finished panels — installed in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris — wrap around the viewer in an endless panorama of water, light, and bloom. They are widely considered among the greatest achievements in Western art.

Monet could not fully see what he was creating. But he trusted that beauty was still there, still worth reaching for.

Hope works the same way. We cannot always see what God is making of our broken, muddied circumstances. The full picture is hidden from us. But the Apostle Paul reminds us that "we walk by faith, not by sight" (2 Corinthians 5:7). Keep painting. The Artist who began a good work in you is not finished yet.