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.