Phoenix Rising

This image was created roughly a decade ago, as an image for the celebration of Pentecost at the Gathering, an avant-garde church I helped start up. It was one of the first really involved photomanipulations I ever made, and encompasses a number of aspects of where I was at in life at the time. Two years earlier, I'd had a Crash. That's what I'll refer to it as from now on. The Crash cost me friends, my relationship with the church conference I'd grown up in, my job, and nearly my wife. In the wake of the Crash, I went to NAIT to get a Multimedia Developer's Certificate, in hopes of changing my career over to something artistic and outside paid ministry, which was all my resume was good for at the time. I never did get a job in multimedia, but the skills I learned at NAIT have been put to good use a million times over, at the Gathering, in my personal web presence, and most recently, to create awesome slides for teaching. Again, it's an example of the way God takes a Curse (in my case, the Crash) and turns it into a Blessing.

You'll also note I'm not following any sort of chronology. I have all these images to post, and if I try organizing them, I'll give up, and post none. So this will be somewhat haphazard. I chose to post this image at this point in the Year of the Rabbit because it's the image that encompasses what the last twelve years have been. The destruction of my career as a minister within the walls of the institutional church, and the way God allowed me to spread my wings in ways I didn't anticipate. My failure in multimedia lead me into education, which lead me to grad studies in Comparative Literature, and on to my steampunk research. When the Crash happened, it looked like the End of many things. In God's hands, it became the Beginning of something new and unexpected.

"Love is the surprise that startles the dark." - C.S. Lewis

“You fathers – if your children ask for a fish, do you give them a snake instead? Or if they ask for an egg, do you give them a scorpion? Of course not! If you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him”(Luke 11:11-13, NLT)