Each year, i look at the collage of amazing instances, convergences, and life encounter blessings I’ve been given on my birthday. I love collage and layering as a means of creating meaning. How each layer of the collage of someone’s life informs, contributes to and reflects the meaning of the whole. My life has been like a collage installed in many places, cities and nations, but to me each element accumulates into an en-toned poem with a theme of grace, creativity, celebrating of unique identity and the joy of expression.

 My life verses are from King David, Jeremiah’s calling and Ephesians 2:10. Each speaks of the celebration of identity, that identity itself precedes and informs what we are called to do, and that we all are God’s poems. He knit us, knows us, and so gives us a meaningful path to walk on and out. There is purpose because of who we are in Him. Then we are free to express it, in creative freedom. We are free both to be and to create art in collaboration with God, and as His expression, and for His Joy. We do not just have to make art for Him, but with and in Him. This delivers us from a religious view of art. We are free to just create because we are creative in His Image, and He enjoys collaborating with us both in becoming who He made us, and in expressing it from overflow.

We are each His Own poems, created in Him, knit together by Him when we did not know ourselves, He did, and He has a path prepared beforehand to be our way. And He enjoys us being ourselves in Him. In short, He celebrates us as His Own art. So we sing the songs of ourselves from this perspective, and in doing so praise Him. “A tree praises God, by being a tree” as Thomas Merton put it.

God has always emphasized this uniqueness, and often helped me remind many other special ones who also highlight identity and our uniqueness. He often introduces me to famous people, or those who are overtly special in His Sight around my birthday. And I get to bless and speak life into them. I often get to tell famous people how special they are to God, not just in the eyes of men. To see yourself as God does is often a discipline and challenge for people who are famous in the eyes of men. David handled it pretty well. And since I’ve been around high impact leaders most of my life, I am privileged to often have this ministry of being and authenticity around my birthday.

I think i do have the gifts of authenticity, His Presence, and Joy and freedom always around me, even when I’m not feeling great. Some of that is sheer gift, some is this inner knowing of His celebration of my identity and creativity for His Own Purposes and pleasure.

 I gave up needing fame to feel good about myself. And I had to place a few other ideas on His Altar, as they say. The three big enemies of the art world: entertainment as self worth, the celebrity game, putting your identity in how you are perceived by others,  and using your gifts to manipulate others (in short, the spirit and ways of witchcraft). I gave those ways up, and chose His Way instead, and asked Him to continuously kill them in me. I had to give up art for a season to do so, and for a while be less popular or even likable. He asked me if I would give up art, i said yes, and then He immediately gave it back. So I really never had to stop being creative, which is kind, as He is. But somehow, He got most of what could’ve become idols in my personality, dead, or at least not in charge.

My testimony in this way is one of a falling star, who actually became one in Him–the bright and morning Star! It was about getting as much of me as I could into Him, and staying there until He gave it all back, but in His Radiance. A disco ball, a chime carrier, a candle bearer….me. Cored in Christ!

Lots of folks can’t discern this necessary backstage process required of high impact folks. Many have no idea how to disciple artists or creative leaders. I learned the hard way, by being one. I do. So I think He’s allowed me to minister to high level people like Madonna and others. As well as the stars on the streets who are not seen, but have just as intense of a radiance, constellation of impact, and can move the heavens just by being themselves. That’s what stars are for–to illuminate things. To be lights in dark places, which is why it is a calling of service. If the core is broken, stardom turns in on itself as you see with youthful versions too numerous to mention. But if we make it past that, the priestly servant opportunity is so much fun, and really a great calling in Him.

 King David lived it well–poet, king, song writer, writer, worship leader, city builder and designer etc….we can go at least that far, for someone’s already made a way. Of course, his spirituality required constant yielding and worship prayer and transparent vulnerability before God. Being burnt alive in public. But it was obviously worth it. What a portent King David was, not to mention his poetry ended up immortalized as over a third of the psalms are his!

 I have almost too many blessings to count, but here are a few which rose up through the lens of my heart this year:

 Met my wife on my birthday! Did a costumed parade with my mom and homeless friends on the Haight Street San Fran on my 30th, throwing one guy (Brother Blue) his first birthday party ever, and we all made art gifts for him-he cried until he laughed; met Madonna (getting to speak into her whole entourage); met the american poets: Robert Bly (we spoke of death and Jesus, and he dedicated a poem to me, at his Harvard reading that night), Galway Kinnel (under the birch trees of Vermont), met, the comedian David Letterman (in the elevator the Rockefeller center, who said he was going on the roof to play softball, of course), and other famous folks, always on my birthday.

 Talking a man who was trying to kill himself, off a bridge in Paris in tongues and using art, having healing on my hands (they literally heated up!) etc….falling asleep on moonlit white rooftops in Jerusalem, cuddled by a copy of the Song of Songs; getting to go to Flannery O’Connor, the southern writers house and meet her peacocks, meeting Willa Cather on her land in Mississippi, meeting Bill Moyers, the interviewer and his wife in Paris, talking art and God; ok, there really have been lots of divine appointments around my birthday, fun recalling them in gratitude…the time my blessed friends in New Mexico sang gorgeous renditions of Irish songs on bagpipes and banjos in New Mexico, meeting a native american elder at the Jemez hot springs who spoke life into my bones in the steams of those hot springs, a silent film b-day gathering a few years back in Austin (come as a silent film star, mostly black and white, and we projected films from the airstream)…just a few of my favorites thus far!

Preaching as Elvis, gave a full word on how arts and spirituality are one in God, and He is One, so we also are being made into one integrated expression, or poem. I preached much better as Elvis than as myself! He came up with the three foundations for a theology of the arts: God’s Oneness, His Lordship over every dimension of Reality, including the symbolic/creative, and His Love for the whole person. That guy knew what he was talking about that day. He had a kingly sermon! I think i speak better in character, at least I did that day.

 One year on my birthday, God told me that He had chosen to highlight identity itself through my life. It was a heavy thing to be told. He pointed out Jeremiah, St Paul and others whose biographies had become part of what God was saying through them. The life itself had become part of the message.

 Since, He told me this, I’ve tried to include my own life story in whatever teachings He’s given me. King David said that his own life had become a living portent or sign. I aspire to that. Sort of a Johnny Cash way. Not so much the fame part, as the life itself as a word or message from God. Still, feel like I’m in that way. My name Derek, means a path or way, a course, or model or pattern of being. Has seemed true so far. Just to be a way, also means that being in Him, and very intimate with Jesus becomes the core of your spirituality! We’ve always been close friends, I think as long as I recall. Not a bad way really!

…I’m blessed. I like to count my blessings, to list their nuances on my birthday…In addition to loving me, God must like me, as He audibly said to me once on the Eiffle Tower—“Check you out!” “To sing the song of one’s true self well, to truly be oneself, is to praise God.” Thomas Merton.