Note: From, To Set the World Aflame (Brazos Press, 2026). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
In the Beginning
We Use Beloved
Tim Lowly’s life did not turn out as he had imagined it as a young man.
A contemporary artist whose work is included in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and whose paintings are inspired by the Minjung Art movement in South Korea, Lowly could not have dreamed what lay ahead when his daughter, Temma, was born in 1985.
Shortly after birth, Temma experienced a cardiac arrest and suffered profound brain damage. As a result, she is today cortically blind and has to be fed through a surgically implanted tube. Her spine is curved and her elbows permanently dislocated. She frequently has seizures, during which her muscles tense up and she loses what little bodily control she has. She makes grunting or whining sounds to indicate distress but doesn’t speak. She rarely smiles.
Her official condition is termed cerebral palsy with spastic quadriplegia.
For Tim and his wife, Sherrie, the experience of discovering that their daughter would live the rest of her life with severe physical and intellectual disabilities was thoroughly disorienting. Their lives as parents would not follow the expected course of events: “At age X your child will smile at you, at age Y it will crawl across the floor, that it will go to nursery school, read a book, play baseball, go to college.” None of that would characterize their family’s story.
Part of the way that Tim processed his feelings was to paint portraits of her. “About a year after she was born,” he writes, “I made my first painting of her.” Titled Autumn of Ashes (1985), the painting gives expression to his initial experience of who Temma was, or, as he clarifies it, “who she wasn’t.” Ever since, he’s spent hundreds and hundreds of hours making images of her.
Tim’s most defining painting is titled Temma on Earth, which he produced in 1999. Located today at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Washington, the work was created by using layers of acrylic gesso mixed with pigment. Its massive scale, with a four-panel frame measuring eight feet by twelve feet, along with its aerial perspective, takes “a person who in the view of much of our culture is a nonperson,” Tim remarks, “and depicts her in a fashion traditionally reserved for the gods.” In metaphorical terms, she appears to observers from a “God’s eye view.”
Why does Tim paint his daughter? Among other reasons, he does so to remind the viewer that disabled children are not freaks, as he puts it. They are human beings. “Temma is strange,” he says, “but so are most of us in our own unique ways. All of the things our culture so highly values – beauty, power, capability – my paintings have nothing to do with any of these things. I hope they challenge our notion of what is valuable.”
One of Tim’s constant aims is to make his paintings as visually compelling and attractive as possible. The hope here is that “the beauty of the art work would draw people to something that they might otherwise not be drawn to,” namely, the problem of pain and loss and suffering in our world. “Andrew Wyeth said to paint what you love,” Tim notes, “and I think I’ve always agreed with that. I don’t know how many times I’ve painted or drawn Temma, and I don’t know if I ever will exhaust her as a subject.”
Love, as I see it after having spent hours and hours looking at his work, is what all of Tim’s paintings are essentially about.
What Tim has accomplished in his storehouse of paintings is not simply an expression of his own love for Temma, which he undoubtedly has. It is also, I suggest, that he is training viewers to see themselves as loved by God, not for any extrinsic reason, but for who they are, which is of course easier said than believed.
To Call Myself Beloved
The American poet Raymond Carver inscribed on his tombstone a portion of his poem “Late Fragment.” In this poem, he wonders whether he got what he wanted at the end of it all. What did he want? To be respected? To achieve something of worth? To do good work? To make a difference? To make a good friend along the way? For Carver, it was to “call myself beloved.” What he wanted was to be loved – and not just to think it, but to feel himself beloved.
While this primal need to be loved is universally human, artists often feel it acutely. Their life’s work, unlike the work of an accountant or engineer perhaps, is often indistinguishable from their identity. For their work to be rejected is, for some, to feel unloved down to their core. And they will do everything they can to keep at bay that acutely painful sense of inadequacy.
Plenty of us, I imagine, have found ourselves in a room full of new people and someone will eventually wander over and wonder who we are. “What do you do?” they will likely ask us. For our part, we’ll likely answer in one of three ways:
- I am what I do.
- I am what others say of me.
- I am what I have.
We will define ourselves, that is, by the work that we do, by our reputation, or by our possessions, whether that includes a degree, an accomplishment, a position of influence or the property we own.
These are all ways for us to say in one form or another that we matter. Yet all of these answers are fragile and fleeting. Jobs can be lost. Reputations can be squandered. Stuff goes missing. Bodies break down, relationships dissipate and one’s apparent usefulness ineluctably declines in old age.
Without a clear sense of our God-given belovedness, no amount of accomplishments will ever feel like enough. No list of accolades will ever fill the emptiness inside. No quantity of goods will ever satisfy a heart that fears that its security rests on its own self-sustaining efforts. We will always need more in order to feel that we matter.
The only way out of this vicious cycle of insecurity and false attachments is to see how our Maker perceives us.
A Voice Came Out of the Heavens
In the Gospels, two particular incidents become, for Jesus, key identity-marking moments. These two incidents take place at Jesus’s baptism and at his transfiguration. They are the two times that the voice of the Father is heard audibly. Matthew puts the story of Jesus’s baptism this way:
And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:16-17 NRSVA)
As the omniscient, omnicompetent First Person of the Trinity, the Father certainly could have said any number of things about the Son. He is the Eternally Begotten One. He is the Preexistent Logos. He is the Everlasting Desire of the Nations. And yet he chose to say this: “You are my beloved Son.” Such a statement, I suggest, should unsettle us and arouse us out of our benumbed familiarity with this account in the Gospels.
Before Jesus has had a chance to accomplish anything, before he enters into the wilderness, before he heals, before he preaches, before he announces the irruption of God’s kingdom, before he acquires followers or a reputation for himself, he hears these words: You are my beloved.
As with Jesus, in whom alone we discover our own truest humanity, so with us: Identity precedes work. Before we accomplish anything, we are loved. Before we make something of ourselves, we are loved. Before we make stuff – good or bad, odd or plain, avant-garde or common – we are loved. Before we acquire a name for ourselves, we are loved. Before we succeed or fail, we are loved.
Just as the Father names the Son as beloved, then, so we too are named, and confirmed by the Holy Spirit, as God’s beloved. “Reveal to us the single loving heart / That beats behind the being of all things,” writes Malcolm Guite in his poem “The Baptism of Christ,” ending with, “You are belovèd, you are my delight!”
The Triune God speaks this word over us, and there is nothing, neither death nor life, neither past nor future, not godawful times or God-blessed times, not a demonic or human thing, that can separate us from the love of God shown to us in Jesus Christ.
As with Jesus, then, so with us. Naming precedes acting. Blessing precedes testing. Being precedes doing.
In I John 4:16, John the Evangelist writes, “And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.” The idea here is that the love of God is not simply something that we retain in our heads. Nor is it merely a fact that we grasp in our hearts. It is something that we rely upon. We stake our lives on it. We brace our uncertain future on it. We cling to the irrevocable fact of God’s love for us.
Yet no matter how intently we cling to God’s love, God holds on to us first. Psalm 63:8 has it right: “My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me” (ESV). While we may find ourselves holding on to God for dear life, it is God who always holds onto us, for life’s sake. He neither leaves nor forsakes us. He does not faint or grow weary on our account. As Eugene Peterson translates Hebrews 13:6 in The Message: “Since God assured us, ‘I’ll never let you down, never walk off and leave you,’ we can boldly quote, ‘God is there, ready to help; I’m fearless no matter what. Who or what can get to me?’”
This echoes what L’Engle says about the calling of artists: “We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are, to see through plastic sham to living, breathing reality, and to break down our defenses of self-protection in order to be free to receive and give love.”
Content taken from To Set the World Aflame by W. David O. Taylor, ©2026. Used by permission of Brazos Press.
W. David O. Taylor, associate professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary
