To the One

The Ryōan-ji, a Zen temple in Japan, is home to one of the most famous Zen gardens in the world. This beautiful garden features fifteen stones and raked gravel designed to promote meditation. What I find most intriguing about the garden, is that it is arranged in such way that the viewer can only see fourteen of the fifteen stones from any possible vantage point. No matter where you sit, there will always be one stone lost from your view.

Kyoto-Ryoan-Ji Zen garden in Japan. Photo by Cquest

When I struggle to stay motivated to work on some of my more difficult and time consuming creative projects, I find it helpful to think of that one stone I can't see. "The One" is what I call the person my writing or art work is for. In other words, I believe if we humbly strive to let the Lord work through us, prayerfully ask that we might inspire and serve others, then the Lord will gladly place The One in our path. Or, more accurately, in the path of our work. They will stumble onto our art, read our story, see one of our prints, and it will affect them in some important and positive way. Every inspired creative work is intended by God to reach some one who needs it, but we never know who The One is for sure. They're that one rock, just out of view.

Sometimes we think we know. This is especially true if we are writing or making something as a gift. While we certainly hope that it will resonate with the intended recipient, we may never know if it really does. Maybe it gets stuffed in a closet and forgotten until one of their kids stumbles onto it years later, or maybe it gets sold at a garage sale. It might touch some unforeseeable person in a way that we never intended.

The One becomes even more unknowable if we're publishing something or posting on the web. Then there truly is no way we could ever know who it might affect. Instead, we just have to have faith that there is someone out there somewhere who will benefit in some way from our work. When we're feeling frustrated, tired, or blocked, thinking of The One out there waiting for our work, needing it even, can help us endure.

Christ said, “What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?” (Luke 15:4). In his 2008 talk "Concern for the One", Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin of the L.D.S. church said, "We are commanded to seek out those who are lost. We are to be our brother’s keeper. We cannot neglect this commission given by our Savior. We must be concerned for the one." There are many ways to seek out those who are lost. One of those ways is through our talents and creative works.

Like the fifteenth stone in the Ryōan-ji Zen garden, we can never see who our work will inspire, uplift, or enlighten. However, God can. The one way to see the fifteenth stone in the Ryōan-ji Zen garden, is from above. God has a perspective that we do not. He can see where we cannot. He knows exactly who the work is for and where it will go even before he inspires us to create it.

The One is out there, in need of your creative work, so you better go get started.

A really bad sketch of the Ryōan-ji Zen garden from my journal.
Apparently, I've forgotten how do do three point perspective.