Freeing My Mind

There was a time when I saw sitting in an office chair surrounded by a desk on two sides while listening to the noise of life being lived on the streets outside my office window to be nothing more than a waste of time. That’s why my feeling of joy and comfort while doing just that today has a sort of ironic tone to it. Amidst the busyness of my life over the past few weeks, I’ve missed being able to wake up and enclose myself in a small room with the sole purpose of praying, thinking and collaborating with God on the next few years of my life. If you’ve been a frequent reader of my less than frequent blog over the past couple of months, then you’ll know that Freeing My Mind has been an outlet for me to express the season of change that I, as well as my wife and our entire team, have been experiencing. The past couple of weeks have been especially difficult. I’ve successfully fought off a rather nasty sinus infection, while at the same time growing ever more frustrated at the medical problems of my twin sister and 5 yr old brother. When you’ve witnessed so many miracles, it makes it difficult when the need for those same miracles knocks on your front door. The emotional roller coaster that this season of change has taken me on, it seems, is finally coming to a head. The questions that have been the fuel for my internal change seem to have finally led me to some answers. What’s most interesting is that the answers that God has given are starting to come from some of the most unlikely of places.

In my attempt to keep the writing here as open and transparent as I can, I believe it’s time that I let you in on some of the most difficult and exciting change that has come about. If I had the time and if you had the patience I could begin 7 years ago when God wrecked my life for anything normal and set me on the path to my destiny. That’s when all this really began: Laying on the concrete pavement of a church parking lot in Pensacola, Florida. But, I’ll save us the time and simply say that in August of this year I conceived. Of course, not a natural child, that would be weird. Remember Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Devito in “Junior”? What God placed inside of me or maybe just awakened inside of me, was a desire to actually take all of my ideas of reformation and love and to put them to action, a grass-roots movement from scratch that would begin within existing sub-cultures of people within an urban environment. To put it simply: To move to a new city, gather people and to begin creating a community and culture conducive to seeing God’s kingdom thrive in a way that I have yet to see.

A couple of weeks ago I was on a plane to Eugene, Oregon via San Fransisco. More than speaking just one Sunday morning at the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Albany, I was going to spend some much needed time with friends and to hopefully talk through the decisions that Lori and I are beginning to make. While sitting in my comfy first class seat (sometimes it pays to fly a lot) I was having a conversation with the Lord. My question was simple: How do we take a message, one that isn’t based around a building or a man, and create a community and culture from it in a brand new place? God simply said, “Look to the magazine in the seat pocket in front of you.” As I scrolled through the various reading materials I was hoping that my answer was not found in either the Sky Mall magazine or the emergency preparedness literature. I figured my only choice was the United Airlines monthly magazine, “Hemispheres”. As I slowly flipped through the periodical waiting for something to catch my eye, I was surprised when that thing was a 26 year old French photographer.

Besides a few close friends, no one knows the real name of this artist, only by his moniker, JR. As my eyes scrolled the pages of JR’s art, I noticed a few things before even reading the article. Of course, I noticed the size of his canvas. His pictures were pasted onto the sides of buildings, across entire links of train cars, and in the midst of both luxury and poverty. My second thought was concerning the pictures themselves. They were not about the artist, but rather about the person in the picture. Whatever this person was trying to say, it had nothing to do with himself. I would encourage you to read the entire article, but let me give you a snippet.

Back in his Paris studio, JR stands before his newest project: a stack of 40 large box speakers glued and screwed together to form a 10-foot tall oval, which is currently blasting the bass-heavy loop of a heartbeat. He sips an espresso and scratches the top of his forehead, which is hidden beneath a straw fedora. Behind his sunglasses, he squints. A large black-and-white picture of an older woman’s face is pasted over the speakers. Her eyes bug out and her lips are pursed, and as the speakers throb, sections of her eyes, nose, mouth and forehead move with the heartbeat. JR is pleased.

Three days from now, this installation will occupy a wall in Paris’ esteemed Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery, as part of “Stages,” an art exhibition organized by Lance Armstrong to coincide with the Tour de France. The piece is a departure for JR, a 26-year-old Paris native, mostly because it is neither illegally displayed nor four stories tall and affixed to the side of a building, which is his preferred canvas. (Other canvases of choice include rooftops, swimming pools, buses, trains, crumbling brick, broken doorways.) You get the picture: JR doesn’t do galleries. His last project, the 2007 series “28 Millimetres: Women,” was more typical. Depicting women surviving in difficult circumstances, it led JR from Kenya to India to Brazil to take close-up photos of women’s faces and blow them up to superhuman size before pasting them all over various cities. “JR is able to use art to confront people with a point of view about society without it being political or malicious,” says Marc Schiller, cofounder of international street art blog the Wooster Collective. “Instead, it’s life-affirming.”

“The media only gives us one angle, and it’s usually from a helicopter circling a riot or war,” JR says, motioning up in the air with a pen made from a bullet casing he found in Rio. “You only see the guns and violence. I’m hoping to give people another angle.”

The walls of his studio are lined with more giant vignettes of faces and eyes, each belonging to the Brazilian, Cambodian, Indian and African women who lined up to have their picture taken. This October, during fashion week no less, Parisians will see these faces on their bridges, banks and city buildings when JR wraps up his project with exhibitions around the city and the release of his book, Women Are Heroes.

But for now, he needs to find two more speakers to even out the left side of the woman’s pulsating face.

JR’s theory is simple. Through the media he finds places that have experienced tragedy through war, disease, poverty, destruction, rioting, etc. He goes into these places and begins to befriend the people affected by those traumatic events. Eventually he finds acceptance among the people and receives their blessing to photograph them. With the help of not only his small team, but many volunteers from the community, he blows up the images to gigantic sizes and pastes them throughout the community under the cover of night. Once the local media gets word of the large pieces of art, JR is no where to be found. Only the people. I want to give you one more snippet of the article. I find his process of befriending the people very interesting.

“The kids always show up first,” JR says as he opens a photo on his laptop of five Brazilian boys from Morro da Providência, the oldest and most dangerous favela in Rio. Leaning up against one another, laughing with arms crossed, the boys hold sheets of newspaper that they’ve twisted and folded into the shape of guns. Trust takes time in the favelas, which are notoriously hostile to outsiders, and JR relies on the curiosity of its youngest residents to gain access.
In another photo, the boys have returned, and instead of guns, they’re carrying newly constructed newspaper cameras, turning the tables on JR’s crew. This is a good sign. Gaining the adoration of the favela children means the women—the mothers, aunts and sisters—will follow suit. And if the women trust JR, the men—the fathers, uncles and brothers, who are also the drug traffickers and street enforcers—will give him the space to work and even spare his life if a “situation” arises. The process is the same in every country he’s visited, hotspots like Kenya, Liberia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Cambodia and India.

“He takes risks without a safety net,” says Marco Berrebi, his longtime friend and collaborator. “But by going in with no protection, he’s relating to people on a human level.”

So, what does all this mean? How does JR’s art and methods tie into God speaking to me concerning reaching a city and creating a culture? While I believe God is still slowly revealing the strategy to me, I think the concept is quite simple. For one, it’s not about the organization, but rather about the people. In fact, when JR and his team leave, all that remains is the people and the message. It’s interesting that we don’t even know JR’s real name. Simply his work.

Young people dictate any society. It is their influence that creates trends, media, fashion, vocabulary and even laws. This does not happen directly, but indirectly.

Messages that are created in hiddeness, allow the message to speak for itself. The message of Jesus Christ has become too crowded by the persona of the messengers. If the focus becomes firstly Jesus and secondly the people that we are attempting to influence, the message stands on its own, without the need to glorify the messenger.

So that’s the plan. Where? I don’t know for sure, yet. We have some things in the works and are more praying than planning, but I believe our strategy is coming together. As I was reading the article my thoughts began to drift to urban propaganda that I often seen on lamp posts, boardwalks and on the side of buildings. Stickers, graffiti and the like. The images don’t speak to everyone, but for the insider they say volumes. Just recently, I received word about groups of young Christians in various cities that gather together spontaneously in coffee shops and bars through text messaging and twitter. We’re going to check that out. Seems like things are coming together.

my inspiration

This is my second attempt at this particular blog. I wrote the first one on a plane from Charlotte to San Francisco via my iPhone. The app crapped out and I lost the whole thing. Never-the-less, it’s actually quite poetic when you consider my thoughts for today.

I never realized how much I would miss writing and more specifically, writing my blog. For the past couple of weeks my time for writing has been scarce at best. Between traveling, speaking and other requests for my time, my once steady routine has morphed into a mere memory. When it comes to what has been the core of my life for a number of years now, speaking at conferences and ministering to local churches, the times where I felt truly satisfied were few and far between. (That story for another day.) Although, for the past month or so that I’ve focused so much time in putting my thought process in word form, I’ve experienced an incredible amount of satisfaction. The actual process of writing can at times cause something akin to a brain freeze  after gulping down a slurpee too fast, but having the finished product produces a feeling akin to finishing an hour long cardio session. It’s not easy, but your so glad you did it.

I’ve always wanted to be an artist. The idea of being able to expression my ideas through a creative process has been a desire of mine since I was a child. My imagination has always been pretty active. As an 8 year old, that imagination was played out through my backyard. My brother and I turned what once was a simple cluster of adjoining backyards into a warzone in which we were tasked as the sole good guys amongst a horde of rotten bad guys. My brother constantly pushed my imagination beyond its brink by always being one step ahead of me when it came to deciding what weapon of mass destruction the stick in his hand represented. The process of making a rock into a hand grenade was very satisfying to me.

During elementary school, or “grade school” for my northern friends, the highlight of each year was inevitably the annual Book Fair. The Book Fair was actually nothing more than an elaborate marketing ploy at the hands of the Scholastic Books publishing house under the guise of reading education. The educational material actually purchased through the financial contribution of our parents was more along the lines of plush toys attached to a 5 page brochure advertising Mr. Happy, training manuals for properly creating trendy friendship bracelets, posters portraying the stars of Saved By the Bell and the most popular item, drawing books. Among my particular friends the most celebrated of these drawing books contained sports cars. They actually did try to teach you how to draw, but inevitably everyone reverted to simply tracing the pictures through the thin sheets of 8.5×11 writing paper. I was never really into buying these sorts of books, but I was always interested in drawing. I attempted drawing the cars by sneaking glances of my friend’s book , but I never could understand how to express a 3D plane on a 2D background. It was difficult for me to even draw a box, much less a Lamborghini. I would always simply cross out the picture I was trying to draw and rather put a sun in the corner of the paper along with a house consisting of two windows and a door in the foreground. Sometimes I would even add a stick figure and a sidewalk. Most of the time the chimney was the largest part of the house, but at least the curly-q of smoke rising from it was pretty.

When I entered the sixth grade I was “encouraged” to join the band. At the time I wasn’t really thinking about being an artist, but I did consider that it might be an opportunity to learn a trade that might help me become a rock star later in life. In middle-school and high-school band, they make it a point to either let you know how amazing you are or just how much you suck. This is accomplished through the chairs you sit in. The musical genius sitting in the “first chair” was considered nothing less than a prodigy at his or her particular instrument. The individual which was both placed in and labeled as the “last chair” was nothing more than a nuisance to the band director. This person was usually the one who was encouraged to receive some “private tutoring” during the time when the rest of the band was playing “I Got You” for the 123rd day in a row. This was to keep the band director from experiencing the aforementioned brain freeze phenomena. Considering that I was given a shot at three different instruments before retiring, I’ll let you you guess which chair position I was. My quest to be a musical artist didn’t last long.

While I have been called an above average dancer, I wouldn’t say my dancing skills portray any kind of creative expression other than the fact that I was mentored in the art by large groups of african-american females. I did go through a period of time in which I became fascinated with the dance skills of the late, Michael Jackson. My moonwalk is manageable, but needs work.

I even found myself attempting to find my creative voice as a poet. Of course, “Roses are red, violets are blue…” can only be concluded in so many ways.

Needless to say, as a youngster, I didn’t find my artistic avenue. It has always been a desire, but it hasn’t been until recently that I’ve finally found my expression. For the past few years, I’ve been writing off and on. Previously though, my writing took on a very formal tone. I didn’t write creatively, but rather with the purpose and prose that I assumed I was supposed to have. In that type of writing, I never really found any sort of creative satisfaction. I was satisfied, sure, but more in the fact that it was done. Through this blog and other writing projects that I currently have in the works, I’ve finally thrown away how I am supposed to write and embraced how I do write. In that, I have finally found my creative expression.

Who’s to tell us how we are supposed to create anyway? In school we’re taught the correct way to write, paint and even draw Ferraris. Then, when we begin to explore people who actually do those things, we realize that the great ones, the ones who really speak to people, throw all of the normal tropes out the window. Painters flush painting theory down the toilet and simply paint what they feel. One of the most interesting painters that I have studied is Jackson Pollock. Pollock splattered paint over and over onto a blank canvas and his originals sell for millions of dollars. Dancers quickly cease to have the right form and instead just let krumping do the talking. Writers use incomplete sentences, forgo the use of quotations, and begin sentences with “but”. But, for some reason we still feel the need to have our art fit into a previously created package.

Being created in the image of God, the Great Creator, I believe that the ability to create something from nothing is in our nature. The problem is that most people see themselves as lacking the ability to create art. Without getting into a high brow philosophical discussion about what art is, I’ll simply put it this way. Being an artist means embracing your God given ability to depict what is inside of you in order to affect and inspire others. I don’t believe that some of us are anointed to be artist and others aren’t It’s simply that we have to free our minds of what we consider artistic. We all have the ability to create. It’s one part of humanity that separates us from the rest of creation. The key is not simply learning an art form, bur rather making what you do an art form.  The process isn’t easy, but the finished product is sublime. I am an artist. Finally.

inspiration… commence

Once again, if you only read my blog through facebook… try checking out http://awake.org/freeingmymind every now and then… that way you won’t miss my lovely inspiration of the day

For those that refuse