Most of my themed chalk arts don’t appear out of thin air. They have a progression. First, I come up with an idea and a “rough draft” of sorts. I start with a theme for example: Easter. I pray, research and brain storm what the theme [Easter] means both in scripture and to the people around me [Example: New life, cross, empty tomb, sin, forgiveness, Jesus, fresh, colorful, pastels, white dresses...]. Then I try to put those thoughts into a visual explanation or picture. With this chalk art I started off with a focus on new life, colorful, pastels… hence the flowers and pink.

Then I re-work that idea . . .

and re-work that idea . . .

and re-work the idea . . .

At some point I have to say that it is worthy, But the more time and iterations of each work of art the more refined it becomes. With this in mind worship art takes on a learning experience for me. Each iterations reminds me of how every day with time Christ is refining me.

And you can’t forget my supporting staff who helped me with feedback.
Thanks Rachel and Moe

Well my whirl wind weekend is over but its going to stick in my mind for a long time. Last Friday I left for PK16 (Promise Keepers 16 I thing pk16 sounds better it brings me back to the WWF days when all the main events had acronims). PK was great there is nothing better than just soaking in God’s presence. He definitely showed him self, 430 men are now Brothers in Christ YEAH!!! The weekend didn’t end there. On Sunday after we returned from PK our church had a special worship service. At the worship service I got a chance to really worship and let loose with our new Tactic M2 (Performance video program). The worship set went GREAT but I will go into more depth about the Tactic in another post later. Just as I thought the weekend was going to slow down I had the opportunity to create a worship art for camp Indi-co-so. The worship art went GREAT once again God came down and pulled us up. So this weekend I consider my self Lucky because all I have done is jump from Mountain Top Experience to Mountain Top Experience basking and soaking in God’s presence.

One thing I find hard to do when I pray is not making the prayer all about me. For example “Lord I pray that you will…” “Lord I pray for…” it is a real challenge for me sometimes to change “Lord I pray” to “You Are”. One of my good friends Chad Swift works for International House of Prayer (IHOP) in Atlanta. He gave me a outline of one of the worship sets called “Worship with the Word”. The set he gave me was on Psalms 63. The thing that I noticed about the outline was how they pulled out each verse and spoke about who God is. Here are some examples

“O God, you are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you,
my body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land
where there is no water.”

Psalms 63:1

You are my Greatest Desire

“I have seen you in the sanctuary
and beheld your power and your glory.“

Psalms 63:2

You are powerful and majestic

“Because your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify you.“

Psalms 63:3

Your love compels me to praise you

“On my bed I remember you;
I think of you through the watches of the night.“

Psalms 63:6

You consume my thoughts

“Because you are my help,
I sing in the shadow of your wings.
My soul clings to you;
your right hand upholds me.
They who seek my life will be destroyed;
they will go down to the depths of the earth.
They will be given over to the sword
and become food for jackals.
But the king will rejoice in God;
all who swear by God’s name will praise him,
while the mouths of liars will be silenced.“

Psalms 63:7-11

You are my refuge

I know this helps me take my mind off of “what I need” and “what I want” and put the focus on who God is , why he is God and why he is my Loving Savior. So next time you pray try to put the focus on God with “You Are…”.

“To evaluate our lives and labors with living understanding. The very small things are evaluated by God as great. Everything compared to God is very small. There are 100 billion (100,000,000,000) stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. However, God has created over 100 million galaxies in the KNOWN universe (total of 1,000,000,000,000,000). We will never produce something that is big to Him. Our freedom is in seeking to establish something that is great in terms of love. meekness and understanding not in terms of seeking to impress God or men but the biggest of what we build with our hands.”

“Our life is dinamically changed when we have assurance that what we are doing is valuable to God. In other words, we feel powerful when we know that God esteems the way that we spend our life (even if men do not see its value). It is powerful to have confidence that what we do and the sacifice we make matters greatly to God and that he will remember it forever”

Quotes from - Mike Bickle

Images from this past weekend’s “Getaway”.

The possibility’s are endless for this in a worship setting. You could have video that is relative to what is currently going on in the service. Now that is cool.

Tactic brings expressive video creation right to your fingertips. This groundbreaking technology allows you to play video the same way a guitarist plays music. Whether your mixing fast cut videos, composing narrative sequence or “jamming with visuals”, Tactic lets you express it in real-time. Based upon Livid’s revolutionary patented video instrumentation, you can completely control multimedia performance with this cutting edge portable solution.

At purdue it seemed with every class and every grade came a number. Wither it was your student id your or SSN you were very rarely referred to by your name. No one cared to know your name they just cared to know your number. Sometimes that can be a GREAT thing but in real life everyone wants to be known. At least I want people to know me not my number but my actions and personality. That may never happen but one thing I know that is true is that Jesus knows my name he knows me not only by my number but also by the number of hairs on my head

“He pays even greater attention to you, down to the last detail–even numbering the hairs on your head! ”

Matthew 10:30 (The Message)

Its such a blessing to know that even though my Neighbors, Coworkers, Strangers on the Street may not know who I really am but God does and he even desires to know me more.