Category Archives: books
calling the hearts of all artists
Lately I’ve been re-reading parts of a book our church’s ministry team studied several years ago called The Heart of the Artist, by Rory Noland. As a writer who loves Jesus, my highest hopes are to pen words which paint accurate and compelling portraits of the Savior, and to brush landscapes onto the minds of readers which love them along a path leading straight into His arms of hope and peace.
As artists, we have the responsibility of making sure the strokes of our messages synchronize with His Kingdom purposes. So, here’s a portion from this book, which is a great resource for those ever looking for ways to keep their gifts in check, while at the same time using them with reckless abandon for a world desperately in need.
From Chapter 4: Excellence vs. Perfection
When we talk about excellence in the arts, we often talk about artistic integrity. Having artistic integrity simply means that an artist performs or creates with skill. Psalm 33:3 tells us to ‘play skillfully, and shout for joy.” Don’t strive to be perfect; instead, try to perform or create skillfully. In other words, do the best you can with the talent you’ve been given. It doesn’t glorify God to be mediocre. He’s the God who exhibited ultimate skill and creativity in forming the universe. He delights in creativity and assigns value to things produced with skillful artistry. There was a vocalist in the Old Testament named Kenaniah who had a reputation for being skillful (I Chron. 15:22). He was singled out for leadership and responsibility because of his talent. He had artistic integrity. We need to shoot high artistically. We need to aim for quality over quantity, and substance over show.
We need to take the development of our artistic skill very seriously. First Chronicles 25:7 tells us that the artists in the Old Testament were all trained . . . Artistic integrity involves hard work. There is a price to be paid for excellence. Don’t kid yourself and think otherwise . . . This is no time for us artists in the church to be lazy. God is on the verge of using the arts in a mighty way . . .
. . . Saturate your mind with God’s Word so that when you perform a song or drama or dance about God’s grace . . . you feel a conviction down to the depths of your soul about how wonderful that grace is and how no one should live without it. Don’t neglect the potential for God’s Word to deepen the sincerity of your soul. If your heart is passionate about the things of God, you will communicate with sincerity . . . If we walk in the Spirit, the Lord will anoint our work as artists, and we will minister powerfully in His name.
Good stuff, yes?
Convicting, for sure.
I confess I don’t prepare my heart nearly enough before I write. And finding time to more deeply develop my skills is elusive.
But I can testify that when I do, breakthrough moments happen in my manuscripts, and I’m the one overwhelmed and knee-buckling-ly in awe of His grace.
What about you? Do you prepare your heart before you write? How do you pursue excellence of mind and talent as you pound out stories for Him?
Like this:
New column: A fully human set of eyes
A man gave a brilliant speech in Washington D.C. on February 2.
As with most truly brilliant speeches in that city, it was underpublicized, underplayed and underrated.
Eric Metaxas, a Yale graduate and author, was the keynote speaker at the 2012 National Prayer Breakfast. Metaxas authored the powerful biography, AMAZING GRACE: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery. He also wrote what might be one of the most important book of the decade, BONHOEFFER: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.
In his speech, Metaxas—some say prophetically—challenged President Obama, Vice President Biden, Nancy Pelosi and the hundreds of other attendees, to consider the parallels between the pre-Nazi Germany of Bonhoeffer’s time and present day society.
Think that’s a stretch?
Just like the Nazi’s convinced every day German people Jews were nameless, story-less and worthless, all around us today are people with names we choose to keep nameless. People with stories we choose not to hear.
Take the unborn, for instance.
Take the elderly, in particular.
As a nurse, I take care of octogenarians and nonagenarians on a regular basis. Rarely visited and often ignored, our society is pretty good at hiding these folks away in homes and villages where we don’t have to think about their demise.
Pull a chair up beside their bed, though, and your view of them changes. Stories of sixty-year-marriages, world war battle scars, children they’ve birthed and who’ve died too soon—all of these stories and more pour from hearts.
My Grandpa Joe was one of these patients last week. A head injury and illness left him confused and confined to a hospital bed, where he required 24-hour supervision. I sat with him for many of those hours. I listened as he recited every story imaginable from his nearly 95 years of life: walking my Grandma to school when they were grade-schoolers; playing football at Tulane; attending a strict, Wisconsin Military Academy; working his way up the ranks in a factory and facilitating union mediations; raising two boys; faceting gem stones; catching small (and quite large) walleye; taking his bride to a fancy dinners.
To any passerby, Grandpa looked like a wrinkled up nobody, dressed in hospital-issued gown and draped in the same bleached white sheets as everyone else.
To me and my family, he was Grandpa: full of more stories than the world could hold; full of stories that mattered, then and now.
Millions of lives end before they have a chance to live, let alone tell, a story.
Millions of others waste away in places we’d prefer to pretend don’t exist.
Which brings me back to Eric Metaxas. In an article about Metaxas’ speech, Mark Joseph wrote: “After carefully describing the inhumane treatment of both Jews and Africans by those claiming to be Christians, he asked then answered a question: ‘You think you’re better than the Germans of that era? You’re not,’ adding: ‘Who do we say is not fully human today?’”
One of Grandpa’s recent caregivers was an African-American woman who told us stories of confused patients, and the awful things some of them say to her.
“One man, he called me n—– all the time, but I knew he couldn’t help it. I knew he didn’t mean it. I just saw him like Jesus sees him. And that made me love him a whole lot.”
There’s a difference between religion and Jesus.
One is a mindset.
The other is a whole new set of eyes.
You can hear Eric Metaxas’ entire speech at http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/NationalPrayerBreak.
Pasturing freely
Some twenty years ago, I traveled to one of the prettiest places I’ve ever been: the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. I spent three weeks there in January, when the lakes are frozen three feet deep, holding up our teams of dogs and sleds, fully-loaded logging trucks driving across them.
Untainted nature hugged my heart. I danced in the freedom of the unspoiled.
And I learned.
Beauty belies danger beneath surfaces.
Beholding the pristine exposes raw places.
And stepping into the uncharted brings fear.
My little suburban home is far from those Northwoods lakes and tributaries. But I’m still called into the wild. The Pristine stands before me and beckons me to follow, into fearsome and uncharted places.
I’m learning.
Still and always learning.
That the fear is the blessing.
Pushing through the trepidation is the reward.
Gratefulness in the uncharted is the way to go.
“It was cold, bitterly cold, and I hurried back into the cabin and crawled into my sleeping-bag . . . Beside me was my pack and in a pocket my brush-worn copy of Thoreau. I took it out, thumbed through it by the light of the candle. ‘We need,’ he said, ‘to witness our own limits transgressed and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.’” ~Sigurd F. Olson, The Singing Wilderness
