process
Mike Gathright invited me to speak at StoryLine Church in a few weeks—this is the third time he’s made the mistake of letting me on stage.
Between now and August 14th, I’ll use this blog to map my ‘creative process’ (I use the term sparingly) in writing a talk.
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Before I jump further, I should offer an explanation of StoryLine; put simply, it’s a community of people seeking together to figure out what life is about and for, considering God as an option. It’s a community that embraces the reality that when big questions become about ‘right and wrong’, we’ve missed the point. That it would let a 21 year-old kid speak for a morning says quite a bit about its character.
StoryLine is passionate about art, leveraging culture to highlight ideas seen best through art. In one sense, I’m the curator of 40 minutes of content—words, songs and film in and of all forms—meant to bring the audience to consider something I believe is vital, meaningful, beautiful.
(“He who seeks truth shall find beauty. He who seeks beauty shall find vanity.”)
Speaking to some people over twice my age about terribly personal matters has helped shape me over the last two years, keeping me humble in my journey, open to life.
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The materialization of an real idea or point to the talk has yet to come. I do know I want to focus on the intersection of two ideas: nostalgia + what our experiences mean.
Having spent the last two point five months in Israel, it’s been a challenge to parse through a good translation of my own experiences in a way that means something, especially to someone who has little connection to or idea of what my life was like. That’s raised several questions: why do we travel? what are our experiences actually for? what do they mean?
I think those questions have something to do with the ache that we get when we long for something in the past—nostalgia. This idea is vague but intriguing to me.
At this point I’m in ‘sponge’ mode, trying to soak in plenty of visuals, media, text with the aim of getting enough tangible content to illustrate an idea. All suggestions would be lovely (yeah, I’m talking to you).
