Between Two Worlds CIVA Conference 2015: Post Event Reactions and Musings from Me

The art and artists that I saw at this event intimidated me. 

  At first, seeing others artwork in such formal (and seemingly lucrative) settings felt a bit depressing. I felt, and to an extent still feel, like a small-time artist with small-time dreams.

However, seeing that there were successful artists who dealt with this subject matter was encouraging.

The scope of the artwork helped me choose to re-evaluate my career direction and the scope of my own art projects.

Here's my name tag, the conference book, and a book we got in our packet. 

 Most of the conference was panels, hour and a half introductions, "lectures," and discussions of contemporary art and how the church dialogs with it.



 One concept that I took away from the many panels was a general duty on the part of the church to open the dialogue between secular artists and art related to the faith.

A major goal of the church in incorporating art is creating an inviting atmosphere for secular artists for mature dialogue, often by raising more questions than appearing to have all the answers to begin with.

 Posture at approaching this subject with the secular art world was a big topic. Humility, maturity, and excellence seemed to be the three main factors needed to engage the contemporary art world.  

Here is a robin that was hanging out on a bush and I couldn't resist taking a picture of it.

Tryptech Acrylic Gel Transfer.

I love this process! Take a digital collage and transfer it to canvas with acrylic gel medium. But that's not all, this was transferred onto a gold ground, which gives it an almost 3-d effect when seen in person.

Spiritual Gifts and The Great Adventure

We all have a special part to play in the big story that God is writing, and I feel like spiritual gifts are his gift packet to us; tools we need treeto plaas Paul our part. When we don't use our gifts, we cannot fill our role, and miss out on our part in the Grand Adventure God is writing . God's Grand Adventure is the only true fairy tale, it is the only story that counts, and it is the one that tugs at your heart to do something meaningful, to play superhero, to change the world, to find satisfaction in a hollow world.
The desire to be a part of God's Grand Adventure, and the sour, bitter pang of lonliness and meaninglessness of our efforts in life to be a somebody when we don't participate with God's story, this is what drives us to addictions and escapism, and idolizing fictional characters with lives more meaningful to us than our real ones.

And at the moment, not using my spiritual gifts has distenced my fullness in playing in the big story, and I feel lonely and unused, unsatisfied, and unhelpful. I'm trying to connect at church, it's very hard when I work so much.

The gifts I have in my tool bag are knowledge, teaching, and visions. I'm not sure which gift these visions fall under, I was thinking prophecy.  But I want to use them more. I'm thinking that the book I'm very slowly working on works with most of them.  Painting during the church services, and the prep for that, has generated a few images from God, and sometimes a long teaching blog post to explain it, like the one above was specifically for my church.
The gifts of knowledge and teaching I know how to develop, they are more easy to discuss and practice in our Western culture of books and quantitative data. Visions, not so much. I don't know how to develop those, or "fan into flame" as Paul told Timothy, because it's so easy to just imagine something.

Why are visions important to me? It's a rarer gift, and kinda fun, and it strengthens my faith in the unseen, much more real world, with it's more real battles. It's a glimpse, a very direct confirmation of the more real world, and God's connection with all of us. With visions of spiritual war, I feel like my prayers are more effective when I see what I am fighting. They are metaphors and symbols; reminders.

I want my visions to go in the direction of being for specific people, or messages for the church. I need to get more involved with my church to do that.

Encouragement From Success and Encouragement From The Trenches

To pay my bills, I work as a janitor. And I hate it with a passion.

Monotonous, and doing the EXACT thing day after day with no accomplishment or anything that really gets "done." And it doesn't really use much brain power either. Which is hard when I have 180 credit hours from college and I'm not
using a single one.

When you find your passion, and are prevented from using it, everything you do tastes like ash.

And it's in this situation that I feel God wants me to write a book, a devotional workbook for artists.
Most of these kinds of books are written by people who work at art as a living, or at least full time, maybe even through church. And I would think there are a lot of artists who don't.

This book would be written by one in the trenches. By one who hasn't had the "success" of profit through art, or the joy of being able to do it full time, and is not writing it out of that confidence. Also, I don't have that kind of success to validate what I am saying. But if God wants me to write this, why should I need ANYTHING else to validate my credibility? Worldly success won't validate it more than God does. Noah didn't have a degree in ship building. If you don't listen to me just because I don't have the resume that you think I need to qualify to write this, you are dismissing God's truths based on worldly value. So I won't tell you what I have that would remotely qualify me to write all this.

It's more important right now that I'm not, and that I haven't seen success yet, and that I am writing out of a place in the trenches, with the rest of you who also have not seen the success you want. It's easy to take the "advice" of a Christian artist who is successful and rich, apply it, and get happy or angry depending on how much that advice "worked."

It's easy to make faith based decisions when you see them physically rewarded.

But I write as a challenge to you to faith in the times when you aren't "successful," and have no confidence that you will ever be. That is where faith is tested. And we are very much in it together, I have no guarantee that this book will make any money. Maybe it can be free.

I wanted crowd funding to take time off to write the book. I have two jobs and don't want to quit either of them.But

I think God wants me to write this as janitor me. 

Not as a person working in the ministry full time, but someone who still struggles. On the other hand, if I don't depend on this for income, there is a lot less temptation to make it look and sound pretty just so it sells more. I'm after excellence and impact, not popularity. And I have the freedom to do that and my job isn't at stake. In a way, it's less of a risk. 

 Yes, I'm scared of being mediocre and amateurish. I'm scared of it being too big and my ideas getting in the way. I'm scared of all the permissions I have to get just to quote the Bible in my book.

I will do the thing. 

Now I actually need to do the thing.




I have already had opposition to the thing, which I take as a sign that its a good thing.