Ars Gratia Artis
A friend of mine just got that tatooed on his arm, and it really sums up this season of my life. In Latin, it means, “Art, for art’s sake” and that’s exactly what I’m planning on doing. Tomorrow marks day one of recording for an EP I’m hoping to release sometime next month. I’ve always written music, and recorded several demos, but lately I have felt compelled to take some of those songs a little further.
Hopefully, the finished product will be available for free on my website as a download, as I don’t intend to have it available as a cd, nor do I intend to make any profit, but it is solely my endeavor to get the ideas from my head into a finished work of art. The challenges are exciting, and I can’t tell you how freeing it is to feel unburdened by expectation, inside and out. So here is my adventure without ever leaving home. More to come soon, my friends.
the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us and unappreciated.
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Can’t Stop Singing of Your Love by my good friend David Norris. it’s too good not to share, so I hope you enjoy this as much as I do!
It’s interesting how you sometimes have to leave home before you can ask difficult questions, how the questions never come up in the room you grew up in, in the town in which you were born. It’s funny how you can’t ask difficult questions in a familiar place, how you have to stand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal.
So so thankful for a god who would give me the things I need over the things I want, even when I so desperately fight it.
“Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”
-Romans 12
Genius is the ability to scrutinize the ordinary
“God’s care for humanity was so great that he sent his unique Son among us, so that those who count on him might not lead a futile and failing existence, but have the undying life of God Himself.”
“Recently a pilot was practicing high-speed maneuvers in a jet fighter. She turned the controls for what she thought was a steep ascent -and flew straight into the ground. She was unaware that she had been flying upside down.
This is a parable of human existence in our times -not exactly that everyone is crashing, though there is enough of that -but most of us as individuals, and world society as a whole, live at high-speed, and often with no clue to whether we are flying upside down or right-side up. Indeed, we are haunted by a strong suspicion that there may be no difference -or at least that it is unknown or irrelevant.”
-Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy
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here’s a demo of a song I wrote quite a while back. I was never really comfortable with it because I never really felt like it concluded. shouldn’t every story have an ending before it’s told? recently I was talking with a good friend of mine about the relationship we each had with our fathers growing up. I came to find out that he had never really met his dad. not because he left, but he died of cancer when this friend of mine was only 5 months old. your heart really has to break for someone like that. I mean, there are just some things in life that will never fully heal. it doesn’t mean they don’t get better, but the pain of remembering will always be there as long as you choose to remember, and if you try to forget, you will inevitably experience the pain of severing off an emotional piece of yourself. so I opened up about how my father committed suicide when I was 17, and how I never really was sure about how that worked into my testimony. again, shouldn’t every story come to a conclusion before it’s told? I was surprised at how my friend responded. he said, “I think the beauty of your testimony is that you are still going through it.” that struck me as odd, because I had always assumed that a good story was measured by its ending. But the beauty of story is not in the ending, but in the hope of a redeeming one. so this song became heavy on my heart. I recorded a demo of it and figured it was time to share. it’s not neat, pretty, or perfectly in tune. but neither am I, and I never want to claim otherwise. I hope this song helps some of you the way it helped me give up on the illusion of control, and trust that he really does have it taken care of.
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