When I Grow Up

When I was about eight years old, I read an abridged version of Little Women and a children’s biography of Louisa May Alcott. That was when I decided I wanted to be an “authoress” just like Louisa. I was always a good writer in school, and when I was a freshman or so in high school I started trying to get published. I never succeeded, but I spent hours pouring over the 2002 Writers’ Market that I had picked up at the library used bookstore.

In eighth grade I discovered theatre, and acted on the stage all through high school, with a handful of small indie films on the side. I majored in theatre in college, and it wasn’t until my senior year that I slowly came to the realisation that maybe Hollywood wasn’t really what I wanted to do with my life.

So, the next logical, practical step was to teach theatre. I researched what it would take to get my credential to teach at the high school level, but I never took that plunge. I told myself that I was waiting till I got my student loan paid off– not a bad idea, but still, I wasn’t excited about it. I finally decided to stop lying to myself and admit that I don’t really want to teach. I’m sure I would be pretty good at it and probably enjoy it some of the time, but the idea of going to work in a classroom every day for the rest of my life does not make my heart come alive.

I’m closing in on 22 and still have no idea what I want to be when I grow up.

Well, that’s not entirely true. But what I imagine looks very little like the life society has taught me to reach for.

Our society is all about individualism. Follow your dreams, achieve your goals, you can be anything you want. Kids grow up encouraged to go to college, graduate, then enter the workforce somewhere. Be a something. My mom grew up being told that she could be a “doctor, lawyer, or an Indian chief,” though I’m not really sure how that last one was supposed to work. She and I both eventually came to the place of asking– “What if I don’t want to be any of those things?”

Well, the more I listen to my heart and think about what I really want, as well as think about the women in my life who inspire me most, I find myself claiming a different dream.

If I think about where I want to be in five years, I see myself married, no kids yet (or maybe a couple months pregnant), building a strong foundation of love and sacrifice with my husband. I want to go on adventures with him, traveling, praying, believing, giving, celebrating. I want hard times so we can prove our commitment to each other and prove that we can still show Christ’s sacrificial love to the world around us whether or not we’re on a tight budget. I see us strong and joyful, partners in life, fighting through the hard times together with love, tears, kisses, and open arms. Will I have a job? Maybe, but it won’t be a long-term career.

Five years later, I see myself starting to homeschool my little one(s), hopefully settled down in one place, and doing some sort of ministry, maybe leading prayer groups or mentoring teens or directing church plays. Maybe taking in people who need a place to stay, maybe volunteering at a crisis pregnancy centre, maybe writing articles here and there for Christian magazines. Maybe I’ll also run a small sewing business and open up a 24/7 prayer room in my garage. (Certainly not all of these; don’t worry, I won’t try to be SuperMom.) But most importantly, I see my life revolving around my family. Taking care of them, supporting my husband, teaching my children. That’s who I want to be.

Is that so unbelievable?

I will never apologise for this. I will never think of myself as “just” a stay-at-home mom. I will never succumb to the accusation of taking women’s rights back to the 1950s. I can be a feminist (by my definition) and a Proverbs 31 housewife, thank you very much.

I don’t want to give up on writing, acting, or even teaching. I’m sure those will all be part of my life at some level. But I don’t want to make them the focus of my life. My God and the people he has entrusted to me will be the focus of my life. That’s the kind of adventure I dream of.

Pockets of Peace

I have been on CR at camp this week. CR stands for Concurrent Responsibility, in which I am acting as both a trail guide and a cabin leader, when usually I am only a trail guide. I spent Monday morning through Friday morning responsible 24/7 for ten 6th grade girls, making sure they’re dressed, clean, healthy, on time, and reasonably happy. Plus teaching them and hiking them with my cabin of boys. The only breaks I got were an hour and a half Monday evening, an hour on Wednesday, 45 minutes on Thursday, and whatever minutes I could snatch after the girls went to bed.

CR is not especially fun. I went into this week expecting to just grit my teeth and survive. And survive I did, but with a lot more joy than expected and a lot less teeth gritting.

For me the secret to CR is three words:

pockets of peace.

These little moments can be found everywhere, if I’m looking for them. A two minute conversation with a coworker while the kids are lining up for breakfast. A hot shower where I can be alone with my thoughts. A couple Dove chocolates with another stressed coworker during afternoon cabin time. A handful of licorice and a little Colbie Callait during a rare break. (Yes, candy is a theme with me.)

I don’t even have to be alone to find them. Just walking through the woods, even with 21 kids strung out along the trail behind me, I can look at the light through the trees and marvel at the colors and shadows. Even if I have only the time for a half-formed, wordless swell of wonder and gratitude before an eleven-year-old is peppering me with questions about bobcats and stories of lost iguanas, it’s enough to refresh my soul and give me energy until the next pocket of peace presents itself.

When it starts to feel like my entire life is this cabin and these kids, God reminds me in a thousand little ways that I am not CR. CR is just what I do, and “this too shall pass.” I am so grateful I have a God who never lets me get bogged down in stress, busyness, or fatigue. He ALWAYS sends me little moments of joy and peace to get me through.

“And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
(Philippians 4:7)

PS – I am on CR again next week. In the snow. With two new cabin leaders and over thirty students in my trail group. Please pray that I will still be able to find this peace.

Holiness That Hurts the Eyes

The Vision

What is the vision?
The vision is holiness that hurts the eyes.
It makes children laugh and adults angry.
It gave up the game of minimal integrity long ago to reach for the stars.
It scorns the good and strains for the best.
It is dangerously pure.

Holiness is notoriously hard to define. Some people say it means set apart, or whole, or pure. It is both the core characteristic of God and also a characteristic of his people. We are to strive for holiness, yet we are already holy.

When I read the 600+ times that the word holy is used in the Bible, the first thing I clearly see is that it carries the meaning of “set apart.” There are lots and lots of references to things being “holy to the LORD,” things like the priests’ garments, and the Sabbath, and everything in the Temple, and, most importantly, the people of Israel.

“For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.”
(Deuteronomy 7:6)

We are holy. Set apart. And what does it mean to be set apart? It means to be different. To be a blue monkey in a brown monkey’s world.  To keep ourselves free from the patterns of the world. To march to the beat of a different drum.

Why should we be holy?

“For I am the LORD your God. Consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy.”
(Leviticus 11:44)

Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh… HOLY, HOLY, HOLY. This is God’s defining characteristic–not love, as some would think. At the end of time, we will be gathered around the throne of heaven, worshiping him for his holiness.

God is set apart in a huge way. He is completely Other, as different from us as an alien from another universe would be on Earth. He is so, so different from everything he has created. We are made of dust… he was never made of anything. He is I AM. That was the only was he could define his existence to Moses. Just “I AM.”

And we are to be holy as he is holy??

Here’s the thing, though. We have no capacity to be holy in and of ourselves. We have been made holy through Christ’s blood. So we are already holy… but we don’t always live like it.

So what does a lived-out holiness look like? 1 Peter chapter 1 spells it out for us. The first part talks about the living hope and the inheritance we have in Christ. Then:

“Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy…Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart.'”
(1 Peter 1:13-16, 22)

So, as I see it, holiness is about being set apart from the things of this world by keeping our attention on the things of God and living in love and purity.

And yes, it hurts the eyes.

Moses’ face shone when he talked with God. (Exodus 34) Jesus shone in the Transfiguration. (Matthew 17) Whenever the Bible visually represents holiness, it’s a brilliant light. Fierce and blazing. And the darkness hates it.

People get confused and offended by radiant holiness. It defies every selfish, momentary, flesh-driven impulse of this world. People feel exposed in the light, so they squint, put up their hands, reach for their sunglasses. After all, this is not a nice safe little glow. This is an explosion, like a Time Lord regenerating.* Maybe we are constantly regenerating, constantly being made new. And anyone who gets too close may very well be swept up in the blaze.

This is a holiness that is not content to settle for what our culture considers “good enough,” or even “successful.” It is simply not interested in playing the game. It is always pushing to be more like Jesus.

There’s even a “good enough” in church culture. There’s a tendency to compare ourselves to others around us, and there’s a nice comfortable minimum that we have reached by silent consensus. But our calling was never for “good enough.” It was for radical consecration.

I want to be that person who blazes like Moses. I want to be so extremely different from the patterns of this world that people squint when they look at me.  I don’t ever want to settle for “good enough” and I refuse to let anything compromise me.

Better bring your sunglasses, baby.

*Doctor Who reference. Pardon my geekness.

Mobile Like the Wind

The Vision

They are mobile like the wind.
They belong to the nations.
They need no passport.
People write their addresses in pencil and wonder at their strange existence.
They are free yet they are slaves of the hurting, dirty and dying.

This is a generation that understands its global calling. These people do not consider themselves citizens of any particular country, but rather citizens of heaven and as such they are free to touch the entire earth. They are the sojourners and nomads. They’ve figured out that what God’s doing is not confined to a particular city or country or culture. At the same time God is with the suicidal high schooler in Seattle, he is with the HIV-positive single mother of six in Mozambique. And because they want to be with him where he is (John 17:24) and because it seems he has chosen to give an extra dose of himself and a special kind of mercy to those who are hurting, dirty, and dying (Luke 6:20, etc), they will follow him into any and every corner of the planet.

Home isn’t a city or an address. Home is in the following. They have allowed themselves to be broken for the brokenness in the world. They give of themselves freely. They are slaves of all who are in need, because really, they are the slaves of the God whose heart beats desperately for them. And in this they have found a different kind of freedom. (1 Peter 2:16, Romans 6:22)

This freedom isn’t of the American dream “do-whatever-you-please” variety. This freedom means freedom from a small story, freedom from living confined to your own little world. They have prayed the most dangerous prayer of all, “Your will be done,” and are willing and ready to follow the Spirit wherever he leads. Even (and perhaps especially) when he takes them into the darkest places of the world.

God, make me the kind of person who sees you in every hurting and dirty face. Enlarge my vision to see the entire world as my mission field. I want to chase after your heartbeat wherever you lead…because when I am tethered to the wind and holding nothing back, I am free. 

Caviar on Monday and Crusts on Tuesday

The Vision

And they are free from materialism—
They laugh at nine-to-five little prisons.
They could eat caviar on Monday and crusts on Tuesday.
They wouldn’t even notice.
They know the meaning of the Matrix, the way the West was won.

Do we even understand what it means to be free from materialism? We live in a privileged society where we are constantly being told what is important. Bigger TVs, smaller computers, smoother skin, better job, louder entertainment… the list goes on. Our world has a system, and this system is built on MORE. We are like rats running through a maze, searching for the cheese that we hope is just around the next bend.

It will take a radical new dream to defeat the system.

God is looking for people who are unimpressed with the best the world has to offer. Sure, we can enjoy it, but we need to be able to equally enjoy life minus all the “good stuff.” We must learn to say with Paul:

“I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.”
(Philippians 4:11-12)

Contentment. If we can discover the secret of contentment like Paul did, we can go anywhere and do anything, and be able to focus on God and others instead of ourselves.

Go to Thailand, sleep on the ground, not shower for a week, and eat God only knows what? No problem. Hang out with homeless people in LA? Can do. NOT spend money on a new wardrobe/car/computer and instead give the money to a cause that matters? Absolutely. Sell everything we own and move to the Tenderloin, the worst part of San Francisco? Why not? When we cut our dependency on the material things of this world, we become available for God to use us anywhere and however he wants.

And he might use us in the more elite realms. Some of us are called to be performers, athletes, businessmen, and politicians and might end up surrounded by some of the markers of wealth. So what? Increased resources are a blessing, and no more so than when they are used to bless others. We are not of this world and we are not defined by or dependent on our stuff, but instead we hold everything with an open hand and give freely.

Everything we own is just a prop anyway, like cheap plastic jewelry worn on Broadway. What’s the use of holding on to it?

We need to become a generation that rises above the system. This is our Matrix; the world that flashes around us is not the real world. The real world lies beyond the skin of this one, unseen. It is only when we grasp this truth that we can laugh at the nine-to-five cycles and refuse to be rodents running on a wheel or chasing that ever-elusive cheese. We need to catch a higher vision.

Only then can freedom begin.

What Do You See?

The Vision

The vision is of an army of young people.
You see bones?
I see an army.

“The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ And I answered, ‘O Lord GOD, you know.’ Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the LORD.’”
(Ezekiel 37:1-6)

What do you see when you look at this generation?

Do you see a swarm of young people selling their souls to entertainment, empty relationships, and cheap thrills?

Do you see minds numbed by overstimulation–overconnected and yet isolated?

Do you see an empty chaos of texting, fashion, sports, popularity?

Do you see confused minds swallowing lie after lie about themselves, the world, morality, and God himself?

Do you see a generation that imagines itself more empowered than any other, yet its people are still completely consumed by their own small worlds and bound by apathy about the things that really matter?

Do you see church kids who aren’t really much different?

Do you see bones? I see an ARMY.

Because this is the generation that God has chosen.

He who makes beauty from ashes will raise up and transform this generation into a powerful army. He will capture and refine that aimless passion into a force to be reckoned with.

Beneath the cacophony that floods the school hallways, there is a profound silence. There is a boredom with life as it has become. People are looking for a cause. They want to devote themselves to something bigger than themselves. They know, deep down in a place they can’t even name, that they were created for a love story and a great adventure. They are just waiting to be awakened.

And even as the Spirit hovered over the waters at the beginning of the world, and even as he breathed life into a field of bones in ancient Israel, God will resurrect this generation. In fact, he’s starting already. The sleeping giant is rising from her slumber.

Awake.

                   Arise.

Let the wind that first stirred the dust breathe life into you again.

Obsessively, Dangerously, Undeniably

The Vision

The vision is Jesus.

Obsessively,

                               Dangerously,

                                                           Undeniably,

JESUS.

I am completely and unashamedly obsessed. He is what it’s all about. All eternity points to him. All creation groans for him. Every soul was created to long for him. He is my first and my last, my beginning and my end, my waking and my dreaming. He is my magnificent obsession, my beautiful daydream, my inescapable addiction.

Dangerous? Heck yes.

Take up your massive instrument of torture and execution and follow me.  I did not come to bring peace, but to rip families apart. Blessed are you when the world scorns, slanders, persecutes, and hates you because of me. When the world despises you, don’t worry, they despised me first.

When your oppressor forces you to trudge one mile, willingly walk with him two.

Sell everything you own and give the money to the poor.

Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons.

Scared yet? Wanna trip, baby? Because if you jump off this cliff, it will be the ride of your life.

Could I even deny him if I tried? He is my everything, and there’s no use even pretending otherwise. I would rather take a bullet to the chest or curl up in a ball and die than deny the beautiful Man who is my savior. He is the only thing that makes any sense at all. My every breath testifies of his goodness, every cell screams his name. Denying him would be like carving out my own lungs. He and I are inextricably woven together. And what God has joined together, let no man separate.

JESUS.

In these moments, I could run like this forever. In these moments I mean every word. Oh, Jesus, my rescuer, let me never lose this place.

The Vision

This is The Vision by Pete Greig. Pete is a leader in the 24/7 Prayer movement. This poem was written late one night in a 24/7 prayer room, fueled by coffee and barely articulate dreams. It was scrawled on a wall with a marker and abandoned, but God had other plans. As if the poem grew legs and walked out of that dark little room, it was soon flashing around the internet, inspiring believers everywhere. By the time it made its way back to Pete, he had all but forgotten about it. Now it is a battle cry of a new generation, a generation willing to give it all for the cross, to live in radical love extravagant grace, and set the world on fire with the message of the King.

I’d like to blog my way through this poem a bit at a time, because since I first heard them in 2006, these words have stirred my soul and birthed a fiery battle cry within me.

This is my vision.

The Vision
by Pete Greig

So this guy comes up to me and says, “What’s the vision? What’s the big idea?”
I open up my mouth and the words come out like this…

The vision?
The vision is Jesus:
obsessively, dangerously, undeniably Jesus.
The vision is of an army of young people.
You see bones?
I see an army.

And they are free from materialism—
They laugh at nine-to-five little prisons.
They could eat caviar on Monday and crusts on Tuesday.
They wouldn’t even notice.
They know the meaning of the Matrix, the way the West was won.
They are mobile like the wind.
They belong to the nations.
They need no passport.
People write their addresses in pencil and wonder at their strange existence.
They are free yet they are slaves of the hurting, dirty and dying.

What is the vision?
The vision is holiness that hurts the eyes.
It makes children laugh and adults angry.
It gave up the game of minimal integrity long ago to reach for the stars.
It scorns the good and strains for the best.
It is dangerously pure.

Light flickers from every secret motive, from every conversation.
It loves people away from their suicide leaps—their Satan games.

This is an army that would lay down its life for the cause.
A million times a day, its soldiers choose to lose that they might one day win the great “well done” of faithful sons and daughters.

Such heroes are as radical on Monday morning as Sunday night.

They don’t need fame from names.
Instead they grin quietly upwards and hear the crowds chanting again and again: “COME ON!”
And this is the sound of the underground, the whisper of history in the making, foundations shaking, revolutionaries dreaming once again.
Mystery is scheming in whispers, conspiracy is breathing…
This is the sound of the underground.

And the army is disciple(in)ed—
Young people who beat their bodies into submission.
Every soldier would take a bullet for his comrade at arms.
The tattoo on their back boasts “for me to live is Christ and to die is gain.”

Sacrifice fuels the fire of victory in their upward eyes.
Winners.
Martyrs.
Who can stop them?
Can hormones hold them back?
Can failure succeed?
Can fear scare them or death kill them?

And the generation prays like a dying man with groans beyond talking, with warrior cries, sulfuric tears and great barrow loads of laughter!

Waiting.
Watching.
24-7-365.

Whatever it takes they will give:
Breaking the rules,
Shaking mediocrity from its cozy little hide,
Laying down their rights and their precious little wrongs,
Laughing at labels,
Fasting essentials.
The advertisers cannot mold them.
Hollywood cannot hold them.
Peer-pressure is powerless to shake their resolve at late-night parties before the cockerel cries.

They are incredibly cool, dangerously attractive on the inside.
On the outside?
They hardly care!
They wear clothes like costumes: to communicate and celebrate, but never to hide.

Would they surrender their image or their popularity?
They would lay down their lives, swap seats with the man on death row, guilty as hell: a throne of an electric chair.

With blood and sweat and many tears, with sleepless nights and fruitless days, they pray as if it all depends on God and live as though it all depends on them.

Their DNA chooses Jesus.
He breathes out.
They breathe in.
Their subconscious sings.
They had a blood transfusion with Jesus.

Their words make demons scream in shopping malls.
Don’t you hear them coming?

Herald the weirdoes!
Summon the losers and the freaks.
Here come the frightened and forgotten with fire in their eyes!
They walk tall and trees applaud.
Skyscrapers bow.
Mountains are dwarfed by these children of another dimension.
Their prayers summon the Hound of Heaven and evoke the dream of Eden.

And, this vision will be.
It will come to pass.
It will come easily.
It will come soon.

How do I know?
Because, this is the longing of creation itself, the groaning of the spirit, the very dream of God.
My tomorrow is His today.
My distant hope is His 3-D.
And, my feeble, whispered, faithless prayer invokes a thunderous, resounding, bone-shaking, great “AMEN!” from countless angels, from heroes of the faith, from Christ himself.

And He is the original dreamer, the ultimate winner.
Guaranteed.

Light and Darkness

One of the best things about living at camp is that in between my weeks of working outdoor ed (a secular program), I can work with the Christian program on the weekend winter camps. These weekend programs are basically a shorter, colder version of what I’ve been doing at camp the past two summers. I love going into chapel and worshiping with the students. The speakers are often really good, too, and even though they are targeting the jr high/high school crowd, I’m surprised by how often something they say can hit me so hard.

Friday night in chapel the speaker was Kasey Myers from High Desert Church.  The program theme is Light, and he was speaking about light and darkness out of Genesis 1. All it took was one sentence for my mind to begin spinning.

“God did not create darkness.”

God created light, and darkness is merely the absence of light. Maybe that’s a “duh” for you, but to me, the implications of that are profound. I pretty much tuned out Kasey for the next five minutes and chased that idea down.
Here are the verses:

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”
(Genesis 1:2-5)

To me, it looks like this:

Nothing. Sheer nothing. No matter, no space, no dimensions, no vacuum. Utter lack of existence.

SOMETHING! Space and a great wet earth are created. (Still no stars or other planets yet till verse 14.)

But it is all so… very… DARK. Black. Cold and empty. The Spirit hovers over the ocean, as though running his fingers over a blank page. The entire universe is silent save for the gentle lapping of the waters as the wind brushes over them. Every spirit holds its breath, waiting for what the Spirit will do next.

“LET THERE BE LIGHT.”

LIGHT! Without warning, a great burning brilliance flashes over the horizon, overtaking the black waters and transforming them into a dazzling deep blue.

 And God saw that the Light was good.

Notice that the darkness was never called good. The darkness just was, before the light.

And the story continues:

God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.

But God names the darkness. He did not create, it and he did not call it good. But he did give it a name.

What’s in a name? POWER.

God has power over the darkness and, not only that, but he uses it for his purposes. (Psalm 74:16, Jeremiah 33:20)

So if this is true of the natural darkness, might it also be true of evil? To recap:

God did not create or approve of darkness.

Darkness is the absence of light.

God has power over the darkness and still uses it for his purposes.

I don’t know about you, but this little sequence of thoughts blew my mind.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
(1 John 1:5)

On Art and Encounter

In an old brick building in Kansas City, Missouri, several stories above street level, is a place called the Kansas City Boiler Room. This is a 24/7 prayer community completely separate from IHOP, but inspired by some of the same visions. The people there engage with God in a variety of fresh, creative ways, making prayer an activity that far surpasses the way we usually think of it.

One of the resident artists is named Linnea Gabriella. Her paintings are unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, beautiful chaos spun from a structured order. This is her way of discovering the beauty in detail and engaging with God.

Jake Hamilton, an amazing songwriter/worshiper and one of my favorite people on the planet, quoted Linnea as saying this:

“I don’t want to use my art to put You on display. I want to use my art to pursue You.”

This is not to say that she doesn’t communicate through her art, but her primary purpose in painting is simply to pursue and encounter God.

I am an artist. Maybe not as talented or dedicated as Linnea, but a creative soul nonetheless. This statement really inspires me because this is exactly what I want to do. When I dance, it’s not for who’s watching. I’m naturally very self-conscious about freestyle dancing in public (as anyone who has ever gone to a party with me can attest), but when I dance in worship to God all of that changes. It might make sense that I’d feel the most free in private, but actually I think there’s a special thing that happens when I dance in public, because I have to take a risk and push past that fear. Every single time. I dance solely to encounter God. I have literally felt Jesus step into my dance at one time and lead me, as the man is supposed to do in a partner dance. What was once a solo performance in his honor became a dance of intimacy with God. It was one of the most beautiful moments I’ve ever experienced.

I also do a lot of reading and writing, and I wonder how many Christian authors today take this idea to heart. Are they writing to encounter God, or to put him on a billboard? I definitely know one author who would fall under the first category. Ted Dekker‘s four “rules of writing,” or, as he is quick to point out, of living, are thus:

  1. Write to discover.
  2. There is no greater discovery than Love.
  3. All Love comes from the Creator.
  4. Write what you will.

It seems to me that living to know God will naturally overflow into making him known to others, very simply and organically. The people who inspire me the most do not inspire me because they stand on a platform and tell me about God; they live in a continuous encounter with God. And as I see that happening, I want it too.

Linnea says, “That’s why you don’t have to do paintings of Jesus on the cross at all times. When you are committed to him, all of your life is saturated with it, and to search your inner self you can see something new and real: you can literally smell the Kingdom of God. Once communicated, people will either love it or hate it.”

This is what I want my life and my art to be. I want my dance, prose, poetry, music, drawing, and even my fashion design to draw me closer into the heart of the original Artist who is wildly creative and infinitely more powerful than I could ever comprehend. Because somehow, when I create… I touch on something that other avenues never could. Sometimes it’s just a glimmer of the divine, sometimes it’s a full blown swim. Maybe it’s because I’m using my soul rather than my mind.

What I do know is this: “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” Ecclesiastes 3:11 ESV

Eternity is placed in my heart. In my soul, in the place I cannot access with my mind alone. I want to use my art to chase God in that place that surpasses understanding.

Art isn’t my platform. Art is the language of my heart. And my heart longs for its Creator.