Famous LDS artist, Liz Lemon Swindle, talks about being sick while painting “Gethsemane,” and shares the remarkable insight she learned from Elder Neal A. Maxwell about the atonement.
See the Painting HERE.
TRANSCRIPT of Video:
And I think, Heavenly Father, one of the greatest things He did was let me be sick while I painted the atonement.
I had the canvas sitting at home—in my studio at home. And I was working on that and I stopped for lunch, grabbed something really quick to eat and then went back to working. But within, just a few short minutes, I got very, very ill. And, I don’t think emergency-room-ill but pretty close. And, I started throwing up and just was very sick. So, I’m kind of thinking: “Well, I must’ve gotten food poisoning—whatever I had grabbed for lunch.” But it didn’t go away. And it didn’t go away for five months.
The day that I finished the painting and I put my signature on it, the illness was gone and I never had it again.
The thought came to me: “My word, I feel so awful. How on earth did the Lord carry all of our illnesses?” Cause one of the things Elder Maxwell told me when we talked about the atonement—on one of my visits—he, he pulled his scriptures out and he read to me about the atonement. And, at that time, he was quite sick with cancer. So, he was very familiar with pain and illness and, and how that applies in the atonement. And he told me, he said that one day that we were studying that, he said to me as if he was—he was bearing witness of it because he says: “Do you know that the Savior actually suffered for all of our illnesses? That means as sick as you’ve ever been He’s been that sick for you. So He can understand, so He can judge you fairly.”
And I had never in my life ever thought of the atonement—even though we read about it, it’s in the scriptures—that it applied to our illnesses. I always thought—always thought of the atonement as sin—either sin you commit or something else, someone else’s sin that has has affected you. But that was what my understanding at that point was, was just sin and—but it isn’t it was anything that is pain or sorrow or of a negative nature—the atonement covers all that.
And I think, Heavenly Father, one of the greatest things He did was let me be sick while I painted the atonement. Because I was mindful every day—as I would try to put paint on that canvas—of what He must’ve—and not minimizing what He did—but just having a better, or at least a more humble, more quiet respect for what that meant to, to suffer in that garden. It really became real for me.