Miscellaneous Awesome

I had the wierdest day today... and as i'm sitting here going through stacks of paper... i just want to write it down. mostly to get it out of my head befor i go to bed...

* i had the strangest dream last night. i wish i wrote it down this morning when i could have remembered it all. in the dream some accident had happened to me and my friends. i had gone into a coma (although i did not know this). when i woke up (in my dream) i found out that i had lived and everyone else had died. it was very sad. the saddest was not knowing and having my other friends tell me what had happened while i was in a coma. i woke up very sad this morning. i wanted to tell my wife in the darkened bedroom... but i didn't want to bum her out either

* i went to prayer. i meet with a group of people on tuesday mornings and we pray.... mostly for the city, but our lives come up as well. it struck me this morning how many of us are in transitional stages right now. in fact all of us were. new jobs. new homes. new communities. new geographical locations. transitions are always hard because the rythym of your life is off and eveything seems very up in the air.

* my friend brian was visiting from california so i let him have my care today as i was working a lunch shift at the green lake bar and grill. we stopped by my studio on the way to work to drop off some art supplies and to pick up a painting that my manager wants to buy. i also gave brian another painting that was just sitting around. he loved it. it was one of the VW paintings.

* my manager today said that when he gets back from greece (which he's leaving for in a week) he wants to go out with me and justin ( the bartender) and get really drunk. i told him i was game but i wasn't a fun drunk. i just get tired. but if we went karoaking....

* my coworker megan gave me these random encouraging words today... about how much she likes working with me and she thinks i'm awesome. it's wierd when you feel uneventful, even blah, and yet there are people around you who perceive you differently....

* i got off of work and skateboarded home... still wearing my tie.

* brian was at home when i got there and we cruised over to green lake for a swim. i usually swim half the lake, out to this buoy, and then back. he kept right along and almost beat me. while we were out there, i had totally forgot to look out for crew boats.... and while we were sleeping them came by. the boat people get a little cocky... they have the mentality that they own the place. i whistled in mockery of them....

* driving brian to the airport.... he gave me a bunch of cool music this week. we were listening to some gabriella and so and so (can't remember)... which is kickin classical guitar music. brian asked, "how do you classify this kind of music?" I said that you could make a "miscellaneous awesome" folder.

* while we were driving, we were in slow traffic driving on this over pass by the downtown. down below, i saw these two dudes beating up another guy. he had blood coming out of his mouth and he yelled "help!" to the cars passing. i yelled "hey" out my window, but the other two guys didn't stop or flinch or anything. i saw the main aggressor just deck the guy across the other guys face. i couldn't stop though. i was in moving traffic and about 25 ft above them. we just had to keep going. it was so depressing. we both felt sick to our stomachs with powerlessness.

*holly and i made tacos together for dinner. we invited about four other people to join, but nobody could come. we were the only ones around....

* our friend annie just moved in down in the basement apartment. she is super swamped, as we all are, and there is a lot of cleaning and fixing things that needs to happen. especially her bathroom. we basically need to scrap the whole wall in the shower and tile it. also the light was broken. we rolled to fred meyers and got the paint remover. we fixed the light but i spent time scrapping and scrapping.... it has to be one of the most suckiest jobs i've done. it's still not done though.... not for a while. so annie has to come up and use our bathroom. i think she's cool with it. we just want her place to rock. we are excited to have her her.

*holly wants to go to bed and i'm writing this blog. so i should end.

not a monumental day in the history of man. but just a strange one to live.
if you read this whole thing, you have a better attention span than me.

SMALL

i was at a christian music festival last weekend painting a fifteen foot mural over the weekend. it's kind of weird for a painter to be there i know.... but i was in the worship tent. there are a lot of things that come to mind when i use phrases such as "christian music festival" and "worship tent".... it actually kind of gives me a stomach ache. if you were to ask me what i thought it was that i was doing, i would tell you that i was asked to listen to God and to make an art piece on what i heard and saw from Him. and that's just what i did.

this might also be a strange statement, but God has been training me over the last years in the prophetic. now when we talk about "prophecy", we are not talking about telling the future. A Prophetic word or speaking the prophetic is just revealing God's word to a person or people. It's always backed up with scripture, so something that God has already said, and it's conveying it in a present way to which God wants to speak to something. so since the nature of what i do is sit and listen to God, and then create what i see, i have come to see that part of what God has me doing is being a prophetic voice for Him. It's not glamorous at all... but it does bring you to crazy places.....

This weekend, the pictures i got were all out of Revelation. so some might think they are future telling... and they could very well be. but do you know what the whole title for revelation is? it's not just "revelation" as in revelations just about whatever. the title of the book is "the revelation of Jesus Christ". (see rev 1:1). so this book is about revealing who Jesus is.

i'll try to post some pictures of the mural and link it to this blog... but the content of the painting coudl be another post. i do think the message was important.

what i wanted to comment on is how God's prophecy is revealed.


so i'm in this tent, off to the side of all the main stage stuff... where rock/alt christian bands are playing their sets and talking about the merch and latest cd.... and i'm by myself most of the days. the first few times i painted, i think there were like 3 seven year olds just hanging out watching me. they seemed to like it. they said they did anyway.

but it was just strange from my perspective. i've been spending all week praying and i'm getting these intense images and scripture passages.... it's all a very intense process. but when it comes time to reveal and create it... nobody's there. the revealing is small quite revelation. at first it was very humbling... because i struggle with wanting others to know the "importance of me" and what i'm doing... so that has to be taken care of. but after we got all through that, i was able to ask the lord what's up with this? why give me all this intense stuff, and have nobody see it?

i started to think back to my readings of jeremiah, isaiah, and ezekiel... thinking of all the strange things that god asked them to do. things like build minature cities or rip clothes and other odd things. i wonder how many people were around to see these things? probably not many. and there was for sure no grand music sountrack playing and non of it was on the jumbo screen at a packed out arena.

it took place in small ways in the midst of all the busy bigness of our lives.


i think we are often looking for God's voice in big obvious ways. and the big obvious ways that we get information or hear from others are through large media outlets and events. so we see christians adopt this same format and use these outlets for sharing their message. and i'm not saying that that is wrong. But in my short life with God, and as i come to know Him more and more, and see how He works, it seems to me that He is speaking and revealing things all the time... it's just not always on the "mainstage".

so we can go through life looking to the mainstage for God's messages.... and it might be on the outskirts in small ways. ways that we don't even recognize or give value to. but when His word and will have come to pass, we will see in retrospect His communication all throughout our day.

we just missed it.

my prayer is for eyes to see Him in the quiet small ways all around this life.
my hope for you is the same thing. May you hear and see an infinite God speaking into a finite loud world with His whispering small ways.

turning 30

i turned 30 yesterday with no big hub bub or fireworks show. Sometimes you think big events are supposed to happen in big ways... but most of the time they just pass like everyday events. It feels like a big deal to me though. Maybe it's my hope of something different. It's a new decade... the 20's have gone. They were great, but kind of a bi-polar decade. Great ups, painful downs.... I've heard that your 30's are a little more even keel. I hope so. I also hope they bring in a stepping up. Doing art, learning to be an artist... these things have been difficult. And not that i dont' think they won't continue to be that way... i guess i'm hoping to a least jump up to some new level of success and to keep moving. I feel like i've been in a rut lately. so who knows. that's my prayer anyway.

This is totaly cliche and cheesy, and not even good theology... but one thing that gives me hope is that Jesus didn't start his "ministry" until he was thirty. Now i'm not trying to say that 30 is the holy number to get your life going... but it does say something about timing, maturing, etc. i'm not going to write a book about it, it's just something that gives me a little hope in the possibilities of tomorrow.

with that... welcome 30's....