…Jesus says that the first commandment is to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength. It is the first commandment because it is the one we always break when we break anything else. Always. It is awful. When you cheat on your income tax, the party most offended is God. If you cheat on your spouse, the party most offended is God. If you nurture bitterness, the party most offended is God. That is what makes sin sin, and we must be reconciled to this God.

Scandalous, D.A. Carson (via futurebibleteacher)

(Source: )

makemestfu:

So relatable blog :)

Flat-out Love by Jessica Park

creativemornings:

“Complacency can lead to boredom, and boredom can lead to atrophy.”

Nate Manny, Senior Designer, Tether
speaking at CreativeMornings/Seattle(*watch the talk)

Live. Let. Go.

(Source: worshipgifs)

(Source: mhellark)

anchoredinchrist4ever:

anchoredinChrist4ever:

We have hope in the Lord and His love for us <3

spiritualinspiration:

“God knows your value; He sees your potential. You may not understand everything you are going through right now. But hold your head up high, knowing that God is in control and he has a great plan and purpose for your life. Your dreams may not have turned out exactly as you’d hoped, but the bible says that God’s ways are better and higher than our ways, even when everybody else rejects you, remember, God stands before you with His arms open wide. He always accepts you. He always confirms your value. You are His prized possession. No matter what you go through in life, no matter how many disappointments you suffer, your value in God’s eyes always remains the same. You will always be the apple of His eye. He will never give up on you, so don’t give up on yourself.”

just right

You see, everything you need - to do what God put you here to do - you have. And all those things that you don’t have? Guess what? You don’t need. You’ve got the right hair, you’ve got the right height, you’ve got the right body, you’ve got the right voice, you’ve got the right intelligence, you’ve got the right talents, and you’ve got the right limitations - even your background. See, God is using your background to make you into that unique servant of His. He’s weaving a tapestry, and putting into that tapestry the people and experiences that will make you the man or woman you were designed by Him to be.

- Ron Hutchcraft

lat1as:

yeah this picture existed on tumblr in 2010

(Source: darthlezbian)

liona5:

→ But your sacrifice won’t be forgotten

(Source: tywinllannister)

christn:

Blue Like Jazz.

I have the book by Donald Miller at home and have yet to finish reading it…But, I’m still excited to watch the movie on campus tonight!

The movie’s director Steve Taylor (also singer/songwriter, record producer, and writer of the song “Kiss Me” performed by Sixpence None The Richer) spoke to us in chapel today. He told us about the struggles behind putting the movie together, how they had to fight against the “Christian” media industry in order to get the movie up on the market due to the explicit content of the story, how the movie almost didn’t happen due to lack of funding, and how it ended up being partially funded by thousands of people who had been inspired by Donald Miller’s book and didn’t want to see plans for the movie fall through. The movie came to be known as the the highest fan-funded KickStarter project.

Taylor used the story as a demonstration of how distorted the image of Christ has become in the current “Christian” media industry. Christians in media now tend to attempt to keep concepts of the faith “family-friendly”, censoring out all the honest brokenness, struggle, violence, all explicit content from the “Christian” songs, books, and films, so that God appears to be more of a “Santa Claus/genie in a bottle/make all your wishes comes true” character. Filtering out everything bad, everything real, everything that allows the world to appear as it truly is…”cleaning it up” and “Christianizing” it in order to make the world appear as it “should be”…Taylor talked on and expressed the ridiculousness of it all,

“How can you make something ‘Christian’ if you completely remove everything that depicts its need for Christ as its savior?”

He concluded that art that depicted real truth—rather than sugar-coated, fake “goodness”—was actually more Christlike than the modern day “family-friendly” world that the Christian media industry constantly sought to display.

I’m really grateful for artists of faith who aren’t afraid to express their faith in a real way. Joy Williams of one of my favorite music duos The Civil Wars had thoughts similar to those of Steve Taylor. Williams entered the popular music industry as a contemporary Christian singer at the age of 17. She signed a contract to a distinctively Christian record label, and went on to sing Christian music. But as the years went on, she began to feel somewhat trapped in her creativity and didn’t feel as if she could express her faith in a free and truthful manner. In an interview about her diversion from CCM, she expressed her thoughts:

“I understand that the mantra for a lot of Christian music is that it’s ‘safe for the whole family’, but I don’t believe that faith is always meant to be safe. I started really wrestling with the fact that I was only allowed to talk about certain things…My name is Joy, and I smile a lot, but I’ve gotten older and been married almost five years, and I’ve lived a little bit more of life. I know now that so much of life is really broken, and there is beauty and strength in that acknowledgement. All in all, I just felt like I needed to take a break, step back, and reevaluate why I was doing what I was doing…At 17, I was so excited about changing the world, telling people about the Lord, and rubbing shoulders with people and hearing their stories. The more I heard stories of some of the things that people were going through, it made me realize that faith was not some sort of religious high. It’s a lot less performance-based than I thought it was. For so long, I felt like if I wasn’t doing things perfectly, then I was just getting in the way, and that God couldn’t use somebody who was getting in the way. I’m so thankful that when I was 19 and 20, I got counseling from some amazing women who told me, ‘God doesn’t need you to change the world; He needs you to be who you are.’ There is glory in acknowledging the cracked, stubborn, scabbed places of who you are, and there is beauty in the nuances of your femininity that is both fragile and strong. It has been a deepening processes to be outside of the context of conservative church language, even though the heart of it still very much rings true, and discover a faith that is more my own.”

Artists like Joy Williams, Steve Taylor, and Makoto Fujimura (I might blog more about him eventually…He’s a contemporary painter and writer who spoke at our university earlier in the semester about similar struggles of expressing the Christian faith in the contemporary art industry, and I just recently bought a book of his.) inspire me and remind me to express my faith in an honest way as I prepare to enter the world of professional musicianship. As a performing artist myself, I hope to bring glory to my Lord in a truthful, honest way that is pleasing to Him. And it is my prayer that my fellow artists—whether they be visual, performing, or literary artists—live to do the same.