Friday, May 20, 2005
My artistic testimony
One of the people on one of my lists asked this question here is my rather long answer. I felt it was important to tell the whole story. How has God touched me through art? I love to tell this story. I hope you have a little bit of time. I have always done art or at least since I first drew that Tippy the Turtle thing from the magazine art classes when I was three. As I got older, I realized that this was what I really wanted to do with my life. My parents had other ideas. They believed that I would end up starving in an attic some place and they didn't want to pay for that, so instead I went to school for electronics engineering and flunked out after a year. I wasn't a Christian by the way.
When I returned home I decided that I would try my hand at being an artist. I did a variety of fast food type jobs to feed my art habit and took whatever odd art jobs I could get. I was a massive rock and roll fan and went to many many concerts and became more and more involved in music as well, though I never was a good or serious musician. Eventually a man who worked at a print shop saw some of my art and asked me if I would like to work in his print shop as a press operator, until they had an opening in the art department. I took the job, I'm sure God had a plan for that but it felt like a big mistake. I hated running a press, but once I was trained to do it, I never got into the press room. It was during this period of time I discovered alcohol. Now some people can have a drink or two and quit. I was not one of them and in no time at all I had a major drinking problem. My printing job eventually went to night shift leaving my days free, and I finally got some art training. I was a miserable human being during this time, at times suicidal.
My sister was terribly worried about me and decided to help me out by introducing me to a girl. My sister hesitated to mention a few things to me about her before we went out on our first blind date: 1. that my date didn't drink and 2. that my date was a born again Christian and that her dad was a minister. Someone told me that the night before our first date after it was too late to cancel. We went out, we fell in love she led me to Christ and we got married.
But you asked how God used art, well I'm getting to that. The day before our first date, I finally got my first real art job, designing grocery circulars starting at $5.75 an hour. There was an immense amount of pressure and I soon saw that this was not waht I signed on for but by then I was married with a child was very poor and trapped. At that moment, I should have turned to God but I didn't. I decided that if I just worked a little harder I could end up doing what I really wanted to do. I buried myself in the one thing I could always depend on (or so I thought) my work. I freelanced for anybody who could write a check. I worked for a licensee of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and a whole bunch of other stuff, sounds cool except some people took so long to pay me that we were even more broke.
Everything that went wrong drew me deeper into my work and further from my family and from God. We had two miscarriages, I went deeper into my work. I lost two of the most important people in my life, I went deepr into my work. My work was becoming an idol. I got laid off from my main job the day my second son was born. I thought that this was God releasing me to become a full-time freelance. I was wrong, God was not going to bless an idol. Eventually it all fell through and I ended up in a series of retail and sales jobs.
One day as I was driving from one job to the next I was crying out to God taking him to task for not blessing all my efforts in this God given gift of mine. I heard Him in my spirit say something that I couldn't shake. Your work is your God. That week I went to Stand in the Gap (Promise Keepers) and spend the day feeling like God got a whole lot of people together just to talk to me. That day I repented of my idol. I went home and apologized to my family and started on the long road toward making things right and I made a promise to God that I kept. I told God that I would quit art and never pick it up again until I did for Him.
For six months I did NO art. It was as if an arm was cut off at times but God called me to the ministry during that time. I started off leading youth, the first thing was to take a group of kids to the creation festival. I wasn't even an official youth leader yet but I went to the youth leader training sessions every day because I knew that was God was leading. That fall I restarted our church's youth group. I was looking for a way to make my teaching stick and that is when God began to show me how I could use my talent to serve Him. Over time, He gave me my art back and now I do it for Him. He has blessed me in amazing ways. After five years of youth ministry I got the call to pastor a church plant where we use art in ministry. I began using a youth ministry resource based on music and began to write my own lessons based on that. That led to me contacting the resource (Interlinc) and I began to write for them (God used my passion for rock music to create a resource for reaching kids.) a year and a half after that first trip to Creation, I was in a room in the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, rooming with the guy who was the youth leader training speaker I listened to every day. We are now good friends and collaborators.
I began to realize that I was not the only person interested in using the visual arts in ministry and so I started A.M.O.K. Arts Ministry Outreach for the Kingdom, to try to help other people to do the things that I have been shown. Now get to travel and teach this stuff. God has blessed me immensely. I want to close by showing you all a piece of art work. After all of those years of trying to become a famous artist, I finally did a piece of work that will be seen by thousands of people from all over the world. It's attached. It's a mural, and it's painted on an outhouse at the Creation festival. That's right, my most famous piece of art is painted on a toilet. God has a sense of humor. But here's what it showed me: some of the best spiritual times I ever had were had while I was painting that toilet and that the art is not an end to itself for the Christian (at least for me) It the means to an end, to bring glory to my father. Thanks for reading this very long post.
One of the people on one of my lists asked this question here is my rather long answer. I felt it was important to tell the whole story. How has God touched me through art? I love to tell this story. I hope you have a little bit of time. I have always done art or at least since I first drew that Tippy the Turtle thing from the magazine art classes when I was three. As I got older, I realized that this was what I really wanted to do with my life. My parents had other ideas. They believed that I would end up starving in an attic some place and they didn't want to pay for that, so instead I went to school for electronics engineering and flunked out after a year. I wasn't a Christian by the way.
When I returned home I decided that I would try my hand at being an artist. I did a variety of fast food type jobs to feed my art habit and took whatever odd art jobs I could get. I was a massive rock and roll fan and went to many many concerts and became more and more involved in music as well, though I never was a good or serious musician. Eventually a man who worked at a print shop saw some of my art and asked me if I would like to work in his print shop as a press operator, until they had an opening in the art department. I took the job, I'm sure God had a plan for that but it felt like a big mistake. I hated running a press, but once I was trained to do it, I never got into the press room. It was during this period of time I discovered alcohol. Now some people can have a drink or two and quit. I was not one of them and in no time at all I had a major drinking problem. My printing job eventually went to night shift leaving my days free, and I finally got some art training. I was a miserable human being during this time, at times suicidal.
My sister was terribly worried about me and decided to help me out by introducing me to a girl. My sister hesitated to mention a few things to me about her before we went out on our first blind date: 1. that my date didn't drink and 2. that my date was a born again Christian and that her dad was a minister. Someone told me that the night before our first date after it was too late to cancel. We went out, we fell in love she led me to Christ and we got married.
But you asked how God used art, well I'm getting to that. The day before our first date, I finally got my first real art job, designing grocery circulars starting at $5.75 an hour. There was an immense amount of pressure and I soon saw that this was not waht I signed on for but by then I was married with a child was very poor and trapped. At that moment, I should have turned to God but I didn't. I decided that if I just worked a little harder I could end up doing what I really wanted to do. I buried myself in the one thing I could always depend on (or so I thought) my work. I freelanced for anybody who could write a check. I worked for a licensee of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and a whole bunch of other stuff, sounds cool except some people took so long to pay me that we were even more broke.
Everything that went wrong drew me deeper into my work and further from my family and from God. We had two miscarriages, I went deeper into my work. I lost two of the most important people in my life, I went deepr into my work. My work was becoming an idol. I got laid off from my main job the day my second son was born. I thought that this was God releasing me to become a full-time freelance. I was wrong, God was not going to bless an idol. Eventually it all fell through and I ended up in a series of retail and sales jobs.
One day as I was driving from one job to the next I was crying out to God taking him to task for not blessing all my efforts in this God given gift of mine. I heard Him in my spirit say something that I couldn't shake. Your work is your God. That week I went to Stand in the Gap (Promise Keepers) and spend the day feeling like God got a whole lot of people together just to talk to me. That day I repented of my idol. I went home and apologized to my family and started on the long road toward making things right and I made a promise to God that I kept. I told God that I would quit art and never pick it up again until I did for Him.
For six months I did NO art. It was as if an arm was cut off at times but God called me to the ministry during that time. I started off leading youth, the first thing was to take a group of kids to the creation festival. I wasn't even an official youth leader yet but I went to the youth leader training sessions every day because I knew that was God was leading. That fall I restarted our church's youth group. I was looking for a way to make my teaching stick and that is when God began to show me how I could use my talent to serve Him. Over time, He gave me my art back and now I do it for Him. He has blessed me in amazing ways. After five years of youth ministry I got the call to pastor a church plant where we use art in ministry. I began using a youth ministry resource based on music and began to write my own lessons based on that. That led to me contacting the resource (Interlinc) and I began to write for them (God used my passion for rock music to create a resource for reaching kids.) a year and a half after that first trip to Creation, I was in a room in the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, rooming with the guy who was the youth leader training speaker I listened to every day. We are now good friends and collaborators.
I began to realize that I was not the only person interested in using the visual arts in ministry and so I started A.M.O.K. Arts Ministry Outreach for the Kingdom, to try to help other people to do the things that I have been shown. Now get to travel and teach this stuff. God has blessed me immensely. I want to close by showing you all a piece of art work. After all of those years of trying to become a famous artist, I finally did a piece of work that will be seen by thousands of people from all over the world. It's attached. It's a mural, and it's painted on an outhouse at the Creation festival. That's right, my most famous piece of art is painted on a toilet. God has a sense of humor. But here's what it showed me: some of the best spiritual times I ever had were had while I was painting that toilet and that the art is not an end to itself for the Christian (at least for me) It the means to an end, to bring glory to my father. Thanks for reading this very long post.
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