Being a (Christian) Artist

06-08-10 And With Heart Shaped Bruises And Late Night Kisses

Βethan via Compfight

Well, this has been a sad, sad website lately. Poor, neglected website…forgive me?

The trick with keeping up this website is that I have lots of other commitments that are more pressing than entertaining some fictitious audience. (Wait, what? Real people read this? Really? Well, then.)

But it’s summer now. I’m finished teaching for the year, which frees up time. And Children of the Wells is up and running. (Go read it!)

More than that, my novel The Unremarkable Squire is going through the last stages of editing before publication. (Yippee!) I have some blogs I’d like to write about that process, but not just yet. Something else interests me today.

Today I read an article, “How to Discourage Artists in the Church.” I think it’s an interesting read. It reminded me of some feelings I had when in college.

I went to Taylor University Fort Wayne. I was a Professional Writing major. Other popular majors were Elementary Education, Social Work, Pastoral Ministry, and Criminal Justice. It’s hard, sometimes, to claim that God called you to write when everyone else has very obvious ways of serving God. Teaching children, helping the poor, preaching the gospel, defending the weak, and…writing a story set in a fictional land? Really?

It made me consider seriously why I was doing what I was doing. I have doubts still, sometimes. But I came to the point where I believed that writing is worship and that my fiction is meant to tell the truth. To “paraphrase reality,” as I heard it termed in the article that led to the one above. That makes sense to me. That, in fact, is really the only good reason I have to write.

From The Story Project to Trouble on the Horizon to The Isle of Gold to The Select’s Bodyguard to The Unremarkable Squiremy stories are grounded in Christian truth, in one way or another. I don’t have another way of understanding the world.

There’s more that could be said, but I didn’t really plan to lay out my theology of writing. And, of course, I’m not just a writer. I’m a husband and father and youth leader and teacher and bookkeeper as well. (Hence the long delay between posts.) But unless God’s grace and truth influences each and every one of those roles, it must not really be at the center.

But it is. It has to be.

 

Comments

  1. You forgot to list mentor, role model, good & honest friend among the huge long list of other things you are. Godspeed!