Artist. Academic. Prophet?

For some time, I have considered myself both an artist and an academic. For as long as I can recall, I have sought to reveal my inner self through artistic expression and also attempted to hone these artistic talents through analysis and skill garnered through education. At different times in my life, that art has been stifled both by extenuating circumstances and my own ignorance. It is because of this my art has not always been what I shall call “worthy.” My art has not been worthy of the Creator of my being.

A couple of years ago, the Holy Spirit revealed to me my role as a prophet. I mean this in a very New Testament sense. I don’t claim to foresee the future or anything quite that spiritualistic. It would likely be more correct to say I, instead, function in the role of a prophet within the body of Christ. I am a voice urging the church to return to the kerygma, the gospel, to Jesus Christ.

For years, I have struggled with my role as a prophet and my calling in theatre. For whatever reason, I have been unable to internally reconcile these two seemingly opposing ideas. Today, however, I may have had a mental or spiritual breakthrough, which to me is ironic due to my current opinion of myself.

I was reading today a book titled The Dead Sea Scrolls Today, which I concede is an odd place to find yourself at least in an existential “Who Am I?” way. The book discussed King David, not only as a worshipper and writer, but also as a prophet. For some reason, this puzzled me. I’ve read the verses where people claim allusions to Christ, and for some reason I just never fully connected the dots.

The Holy Spirit revealed himself to David through David’s art.

As I have said many times, “My mind…She is blown.” I don’t know why I had never realized it, not just for David but for me as well. I have always viewed my role in the theatre in the framework of Romans 12:1, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

I saw myself as simply presenting myself to God, holy and acceptable [hopefully] as a means of fulfilling my calling and worshipping him in spirit and in truth. What I failed to realize was the simple truth. God can reveal Himself through my art, not just art in general, but specifically, in my art.

Woah.

Perhaps, my role as a prophet should simply work to augment my calling as an artist. Perhaps I should be using theatre to call people back to excellence back to the creator of the universe. I would like to note that I am not talking about ministry. I spent four years at a Bible school studying ministry and theatre, and I know beyond the doubt of a shadow I am not supposed to be in full-time ministry.

It could be God has called me to the theatre for the purpose of exposing His beauty. I just hope he will give me the strength to overcome any circumstances, and most of all the wisdom and clarity of thought to deal with my own ignorance.

-scritch out

"There but for the grace of God, go I."

So at Pat’s wedding, I managed to hit it off with an old friend. His name is Angelo Valle. He’s currently graduated, married, and attending Westminster. Today, we made a point to get coffee and talk. It was exactly what I needed. I have been praying now for days. I’m so confused. I’m so frustrated. I feel like I’ve been given a very small chip of my life to manage, and I think I’ve done a pretty good job with it. The problem is that I want to see the puzzle. I want to control my fate and I can’t.

I have uncomfortably discovered that God is on control of my future. Also, I may be a Calvinist and I mean that in the lightest sense of the title. I’ve just recently found myself very humbled by the grace of God. I don’t deserve this grace thing . . . not at all. There is no part of me that could ever earn his salvation and I can almost feel his hands around me . . . holding me . . . sustaining me by his grace alone. The thought of that just overwhelmed me today. The chair that I’m sitting on right now, the words that I type, the thoughts that you are having as you read this . . . They are only sustained by the grace of God.

I don’t know where I stand on my thought of salvation, but I don’t think that in my fallen state that I could have chosen Him. I was placed in a good home, brought up on the Bible, and I did absolutely nothing for it. My every movement has been orchestrated and used for the ultimate glory of God. Through my victories I can learn his grace for I am undeserving, and through my suffering I can better identify with Christ.

Who am I that God should rescue me? I am nothing to no one but to Him. I will humbly submit to his will and his will alone because he is God and he is on the throne. I don’t know whether or not God has only to chosen to rescue some and allowed others to be damned. I don’t know . . . but if I am . . . If I am . . . then I can only respond by worshipping Him and Him alone.

Without His intervention, whether He made himself apparent and I chose him or He grabbed hold of me and I clung to him, then I would be damned.

‎"There but for the grace of God, go I."

Will.

If there truly is a benevolent God who manifested Himself in the being of Christ Jesus orchestrating the Universe, can there really be free will?

If we pre-suppose Original Sin through the story of Adam and Eve as outline in the Bible, can a loving benevolent God exist in despite of the presence of Evil? If God love us so much, why does he allow us to suffer?

In the Garden of Eden, mankind was given a choice: Obey Me or Get Lost. God placed his creation as governors over the entirety of Creation allowing them to freely choose good or evil. He gave them the entirety of the world with only one command, “Do not eat from the forbidden tree.” God stacked the deck in favor of obedience. It wasn’t enough for Him, you see, to simply create humanity and force them to obey his will. If they were to do so they would be no different than the animals. They would have no choice because they would not be intelligent enough to choose for themselves.

God wanted to create humanity in his own image. That is to say with the Imago Dei or the Image of God. He wanted humanity to create and to prosper as he does. Being created in the Image of God presupposes our ability to choose. Can God choose to be evil? In my human understanding I would say, “Yes.” In my understanding of the nature of God through the Revelation of the scripture I would say, “No.” God is not good because he doesn’t want to be good. He is good because he is inherently good.

He did not want to create a race of servants who had no choice but to serve. He created humanity with the option to not serve him. They, possessing the Imago Dei with them, would have the option to choose an alternative path than the one laid down for them by the Creator. This is what we call Free Will. [If You come from this with a Calvinistic understanding of salvation then you should probably discontinuing reading this now and go be a Calvinist elsewhere.]

Free will is our ability to choose. Though our choices may be stacked in favor of one choice rather than another, we still posses the ability to walk down a less favorable path. When we walk down this road, we do so in contradiction to the original plan. Adam and Eve possessed eternal life in the garden. They walked almost hand in hand with God. They were innocent. Pure.

When they willfully chose to sin by disobeying God’s only command, they chose to take an alternative route. Being that God had created them free. They were free to do so. Why would an omniscient God who knew everything and knew that he would be disobeyed not intervene and stop them from sinning in the first place? Because such an intervention would have contradicted his original intent in creating humanity.

He gave humanity the ability to choose. He wanted them to serve Him. That’s why he stacked the deck in the favor of choosing Him. He created for Adam and Eve an entire planet with only one single tree being forbidden. It isn’t like he created a grove of forbidden trees and only one good one. He didn’t set them up to fail. He set them up for a choice that he knew that they would disobey.

That was unsettling to Him, but he knew that it was in the hearts of his creation to disobey. They had freewill. They had it within them to choose to sin, but they also had it within them to come back. Hence why as soon as they are reprimanded for their sin, they are given provision and a hope that one day their offspring would be reconciled unto God again.

We now fast forward to today. The presence of sin in the world is apparent. With the sex slave industry and senseless violence, it is difficult to see a loving God. How can we explain the lack of intervention on the part of God when there are children being sold into slavery? I believe the answer lies in free will.

We posses within us the ability to choose our actions, we also have the ability to impose our will upon others. If God were to intervene in almost every case, just as it would’ve in the Garden of Eden, it would ultimately be contradictory to his very nature. Allowing mankind to choose for themselves. He guides through subtly and through events in our lives. Even the most tragic of things are used as agents to guide his creation back to it’s original intent. Not that he initiates these actions or causes them to come into being; he allows them to happen because he has given mankind the freedom to choose evil. What God created he saw as good [or in the Hebrew finished/complete]. What man created was a perversion of what God created . . . Evil.

What do you do then with natural disasters, which kill millions of Christians and non-Christians alike?

This world is not our final destination. If you presuppose that the God of the Bible exists and the Bible is his revelation to mankind, then you also presuppose it as truth. If the Bible is true than there is another world after this one . . . A second Earth for those who chose Him despite the evil in the world.

In this world, there will be no sickness or pain; there will be no natural disasters or suffering. There will only be the eternal glory of God. Here the people who chose God would then be able to choose Him for all eternity, with the deck eternally stacked in favor or worshipping God.

If we posses the freedom to create Evil, but choose to follow the original plan through the example of Jesus Christ then and only then is there an explanation to the suffering in the world. The suffering imposed by other people, is those people choosing evil. It is up to the person who has had evil done to them to choose whether or not to return evil with evil creating more evil or to choose a higher road and allow God to create good. The changing of the Earth is only a bi-product of the temporality of this life.

“This world that seems to us so real, so substantial, is nothing more than the Shadowlands . . . Real life has not yet begun.”

Beginning.

Beginning.

“In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”

Genesis 1:1

Every child raised in a Christian home can recite the verse from memory at the drop of a hat. Every child is informed of the existence of an omnipotent God who designed the universe before its existence and created it from nothing. They are told the creation account. How this God also performed this feat in only seven days, as if it were some cosmic feat of strength performed by an omniscient magician.

The Creation account teaches us our role in the universe. It shows the majesty of God without ever giving insight into the minuet details not explained in the Bible. Would it diminish the God of the universe at all, if perhaps the creation account were not a literal telling of how the universe was created? Are theories like evolution really so intimidating that instead of embracing science, we reject it like a leper?

Having been raised in an Assembly of God church, I was raised on the Seven Day Creation account. I was told that God formed Adam from the dust of the Earth and breathed life into Him. When a suitable helper was not found in Creation, God, in his infinite wisdom, removed from Adam a rib and created Eve. Adam and Eve were given to one another in every way. They were perfectly suited for one another down to their very DNA.

If this God who had the insight enough to create his homo sapiens with the ability to reproduce, could he not also have the insight to guild a single cell across a millennia in order to eventually form the man he would name Adam? If God is outside of reality and time and if reality and time are simply agents that God has created for his creations, could he not spend mere seconds guiding his creation for millions of years?

There is, of course, the problem with the Genesis account. The Creation account is a beautiful description of the creation of the universe for the audience that was receiving it. Even today, we can look to the book of Genesis for a fantastic depiction of the God of the universe, but it should not necessarily be taken literally by modern Christians. With science constantly progressing and the potential for singularity to be but a few decades away, it is now more than ever necessary for Christians to understand the ways of the universe.

The universe is expanding. Every day, scientists unlock new ideas and facts about Creation of which our forefathers could have only dreamed. We will be faced with varying degrees of intensity from science in retaliation to our beliefs. It is not our worldview that should be shaken by these new revelations.

God gave this universe to his creation with the intent of exploring it. Through his creation, we see an insight into the mind of God Himself. We see the detail of the universe and the amount of time that it would take to orchestrate such majesty is incomprehensible to the human mind. We can see the moving of the planets and the shifting of molecules. God has created everything from the inconceivably large to the infinitesimally small.

This God, this architect of Creation could have created the world in seven days just like the book of Genesis tells us. He could have created the world so that it would appear as if it were billions of years old although that would make God a deceiver and that does not fit with our current paradigm. God could have created the world six thousand years ago and perhaps our assumptions and conclusions about the life of carbon are incorrect. It is also possible, however, that God being outside of space and time and completely unaffected by it, created the universe billions of years ago and watched as every single atom that he set in motion merged and converged until we have an early form of the universe we now experience.

If this were correct, then God would have to guide and nurture every single aspect of his creation. He would have to be the ultimate micromanager. Would not a God who nurtured every single cell of his human creations seem more loving and more infinitely patient than a God who simply threw everything into existence?

The Creation account shows us the beauty and captures the essence of the majesty of the Creator of the Universe, but the God of the Universe is so much more complicated and delicately constructive than any book or any story could ever possibly conceive. No author could ever capture the true beauty of a God sitting over his creation nurturing it until it has reached its full potential. The image is like that of a man sitting over a puzzle box with a pair of tweezers. He delicately moves every single piece into it’s perfect location until the beauty and complexity of the puzzle is more than breathtaking to behold and is impossible to unravel.

Can a Christian write good horror?

Can a follower of Christ write good horror?

Christianity teaches universal love of humanity.

"Hate the sin, love the sinner."

It is also a religion of peace.

Followers of Christ should exemplify certain Christ-like qualities: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Self-Control.

Is it possible for someone to exemplify all of these traits and to be a follower of Christ while writing something that sometimes glorifies the opposite?

I honestly don't know.

I am a good Christian man . . . as good as I can be I suppose, but I also have an odd taste in movies and books. I enjoy the writings of Lovecraft and Stephen King. I love classic horror films like Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman. I also really liked Zombie movies. George Romero is a genius. I'm not crazy about slasher flicks, but Candyman III was the scariest movie I've ever seen (only because I was like 12 when I saw it) and John Carpenter's Halloween was fantastic.

So taking influences from these various forms of horror and a little bit from natural ability and creativity, I have taken to writing short stories. I have so far only written three and they're going to be a part of a book of short stories tentatively titled, "Monsters." Granted it's not an original title, but it's simple and I like it.

That being said though . . . am I wrong? Is there something wrong with my Christianity? Is there something wrong with me? Am I disturbed? I don't think so.

I think that I am able to identify the horror of an imaginative life because I have been saved from the very real world of sin. What I do when I write is display the horrors of sin and the horror induced by these fictitious monsters. Though I do not show the grace of Christ, I think I can say that sometimes in life you don't see the grace. When evil is so prevalent, sometimes it is all we can see. That's why I write works of fiction. I create monsters that couldn't possibly be real. They are just archetypes. They are pictures of a seriously distorted world. This isn't necessarily my world or my worldview. It is simply the manifestation of my view of sin.

Please excuse the sporadic nature of my thoughts.

I haven't full formulated my opinion.

I'm contemplating trying to get published.

The following is an excerpt from The Tragic.

Amanda Smith had known now for a few months now that something was living under her bed. She had often heard it breathing when she closed her eyes at night, and when she’d peek out of the corner of her eye over the edge of the bed and down to the floor, there had been many times when she could’ve sworn that she has seen it dash back under. The creature was small, black, and quick and she hoped that it wasn’t dangerous. At nights when she’d close her eyes, her mind would turn to what she called her imp. That’s what she would’ve called it, you see, had she been willing to tell anyone what she’d been seeing.

Oh, machines

Tick, tock, tick, tock

The whirring gears and tortured clocks

Broken, crashing, whirring, burning

Broken arms and bodies turning

Feed the anger, cut the wire

Fuel for unrelenting fires

Sails raised high, tattoo the sky

Oil for tears, and blood for dye

Something new, but nothing human

Bronze and bold, freak Centurion

Glass for skin, camera eyes

Forced to remain lobotomized

Hooks for hands, and wood for legs

Clay for face, and clockwork brains

Copper wire set in stone

Given life but not a home

Band together on a skiff

Pray the sky remains lit

The stars come out

Engines ignite

The skiff bursts with flame

Into the night

Another sky, another sea

Another human tribe will scream

Turning on their own creators

Turning cities into craters

Shallow Confession

Don’t put me on the spot

I don’t think I’d like that very much at all

The single light aimed like a cannon at my shaking body

The drops of sweat run like bullets down my face

My feet feel like lead and my tongue tastes like gravel

I open my mouth but only profanities fall out

I’d pick them up but the audience has devoured them

If I show my nerves

If I screw up

I will be next

Eaten alive to feed the machine

Don’t put me on the spot