A great artist...

A number of years ago, I fell in love with the fun artwork of Norm Daniels. Since 1989, NOrm has been, in his words, "a resident artist, architectural designer and general Knucklehead" for Hume Lake Christian Camps.

Norm is a great artist and illustrator, taking his influences from Rick Griffin and plein air painters Ken Auster and Elaine Thompson.

Norm has just accepted the position of Executive Director for Pine Valley Bible Conference Center. He'll definately be missed by Hume and the "face" of Hume's sets and team designs will never be the same.

Norm's art is for sale. If you like it, buy it. As he says, "These paintings are for sale, and my family would love it if you buy one or two. I'm negotiable, cause I'm new at this, and the kids need braces. Get your foot in the door of this ground floor investment, who knows, I might become the next Thomas Kinkade … 'Norm, the painter of salt water' … any way I hope you enjoy them! 'Bid High, Bid Often.'"

Here is some more of Norm's work...

Christian creativity...

I've been gone from blogging for a couple of weeks. Sorry! In that time I have thought about creativity and the world of Christian.

Why is it that Christians tend to copy culture, rather than affect culture? Why is it that we copy cool cultural ideas rather than come up with them?

Case in point: the LiveStrong armband. This is a great idea. Lance Armstrong came up with a bracelet that says something positive about life and supports cancer research. And what do Christians do? We copy it. We make little colored armbands with cool Christian sayings.

Understand, I am not knocking wearing Christian armbands with cool Christian sayings. I'm just wondering why we can't come up with a concept that grabs the culture with a positive while doing something positive (like helping to fund cancer research). And we could even do it without the necessity of having a Four Spiritual Laws included with every armband.

We could just say, "Hey, as Christians we want to stand up for good things. We do it because we believe that God loves everybody and we want to try to live that." Maybe then our message of salvation would begin to be accepted.

It's an old saying, but it's true: People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

So let's impact culture. Let's do it in a way that is positive. Let's do it without the overtly stated goal of the salvation of the lost (this is a STEP in the process, not the end of the process).

Here ends the rant.