Each of us reflects in numerous ways the characteristics of the one who created us, though in a form that's been both diluted and tainted. One of the most obvious ways this shows up is in our creativity. Call it self-expression or artistry or ingenuity, all people have been given a measure of that spark, that impulse to produce something new, to bring about what does not yet exist. We are creative because God is creative, and we bear his image.

Here at "Art of (the) Following" we follow our creator as revealed in the person of Jesus. And through the arts, we invite and enable others to do the same. Why? Because art has the power to reach deep into our core, especially the core of the artist. So in our minds, it's a natural way for artists to learn life-changing truths.

The idea is simple, really. The scriptures are like a gallery of God's artistry -- his literature, his poetry, his narrative, his lyrics, his symbolism, his design, his passion, his beauty, his enduring dance with humanity. When artists interpret what they discover firsthand in the scriptures (using their own writing or song or voice or dance or lines or colors), when their art meets God's art, they cannot remain unchanged.

So the group of painters who create a mural depicting the shepherd of Psalm 23 as a lifeguard watching over small children in the middle of an urban street now better understand how they can "fear no evil." The teen who with a mentor fashions a pair of collage boots based on three brief interactions of Jesus now better grasps the cost of following, and chooses to accept it. By engaging God's literature with their own art forms, artists embrace what they learn at the deepest of levels.

Our passionate calling is to do all we can to facilitate this, to connect the created to the creator.

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