Reading Leeana Tankersley's new book, Found Art, was reading the internal map of a woman whose life is in a constant place of discovery. Some discoveries are beautiful, immortal; others speak of the hurt and despair of this world that highlight the enormity of our mortality. As a woman married to a United States serviceman, her life became something far more than what she could have ever imagined it would be, when she said "I do." It became more than a mission of living a new combined life with a husband and a newly constructed household. It became a purpose she had to accomplish within herself, a world she had to be introduced to, a way of finding the art lying hidden beneath the surface.
Change is never easy.
The foreign soil of a life utterly uprooted and changed time and again tested Leeana to the breaking point at times. But the reality that she had to accept and the lesson her writing teaches anyone who reads her book is that the truest sign of that acceptance is the ability to appreciate the beauty in the most foreign of places, in the most strange circumstances which call upon all of us to reach for God even in the most unconventional of ways. God exists in the unfamiliar as much as the familiar. God's peace can exist even when our lives are anything but peaceful.
The precious emblems of life, the art that we find in the ruins of life, are the very tokens of belief that we all need to push forward when God requires so much more than we believe we can give. This what Leeana's book is about - the finding of those moments, those emblems, those irreplaceable artifacts of life that point to God's enormous grace in the face of life's challenges. This is her story, uniquely hers and uniquely powerful as all testimonies are, but it is also her permission to us all - to live with our eyes, our heart, our minds wide open even when we are afraid to do so.
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