Radiate: Tristan Mason’s blog

Well, folks, our house is slowly looking better. Here’s a before-and-after of the kitchen for you:

The floor is still 10-year-old scratched-up linoleum with pink and blue flowers… eventually we hope to replace that. I’d also like to install track lighting over the left counter area one of these days. But for now, we’re pretty happy with it.

I spent Thursday and Friday at the Willow Creek Arts Conference. (Afterward, Dave and I visited the Art Institute of Chicago. He has some great pics on his blog.) I’ve never been to Willow before, and I was really impressed. Sure, their campus is huge and beautiful, but I was even more impressed by visiting a church that is doing things excellently in the technical and artistic realms—a church that intentionally values artists and the arts. For a while it made me wish I had ginormous technical and artistic budgets so I could do big expensive things and entice lots of talented people to get involved… but when I came to my senses I felt uber-sheepish for believing, even for a minute, that excellence is directly proportional to budget size.

After thinking about it, I have two things to say about this.

First: While excellence is not dependent on budgets, a local church’s overall level of commitment to communicating effectively and excellently with all kinds of people is reflected in the resources (time, attention, people, money, etc.) they are willing to put into promoting artistic excellence. For example, it’s expensive but worth it to hire a qualified staff member who is dedicated to overseeing and promoting visual arts and visual communication in the church. (This would greatly benefit the reaching and teaching of highly visual (image-centric) people whose eyes really are the windows to their soul. By the way, those people now comprise a formidible—and growing—percentage of the population, which is a topic for another post.) (Sorry for all the parentheses in this paragraph.)

Second: while a lot of us might be doing things more excellently if we had budgets the size of a small country and a veritable army of professional-level volunteers, I think often this is just an excuse for failing to be as content and profitable as I should be with what I have been given. An incisive, well-acted drama or a meaningful, skillfully-created painting can be excellent regardless of the budget provided. In the “parable of the talents”, Jesus was just as happy with the $2,000,000-doubling steward as he was with the $5,000,000-doubling steward. They both increased what they had been given by using it wisely, offered it all back to their master, and were rewarded identically.

I suppose my point is that excellence itself is a direction, not a destination, and is not dependent on the extensiveness of our resources. This isn’t a new revelation, of course. it’s just a reminder, mostly to myself, that God-honoring excellence is based on 1) giving my best to God as an act of worship, and 2) striving balencedly (?) for continued growth toward a better best. That’s half the issue. But there are times when the intensity of excellence (for lack of a better term) has the potential to be far greater, yet is hindered by lack of resources. There is potential excellence that can blaze at great intensity for the kingdom of God if it is realized, and usually it takes resources and sacrifice for the intensity of that excellence to increase.

Hmm. When this post started, I was just going to write about my kitchen. Apparently something else needed to be let out of my head.

Thoughts? Comments?

...was fantastic. We stayed in Chico, which is way up in northern Cali – about 90 minutes north of Sacramento or 8 hours north of Los Angeles. It was a week of great physical exercise and extraordinary gastronomic delights. I played 3-on-3 basketball with people who were way out of my league (almost all of them had played on their high school teams, and some had played college ball). For those of you that know me and my basketball ability, this is laughable. But it was also fun. I also swam, lifted weights, and went on an 8-mile hike. Essentially, we packed more exercise into a week than I normally get in a month. Good times. But then, we had to do this in order to make up for the amount we ate. Everything I ingested was like the food of the gods. Take, for instance, this fruit tray, expertly and artistically arraged by my talented wife:

Yes, those are fudge-covered strawberries. Everything we ate was that good. Wow.

So anyway, we had a great time. I’ll post some more pictures from the trip later if I ever get internet access at home.

Unfortunately, my friends, I believe my ultra-reliable gray Subarubaru will at last be forced to retire to its final resting place. Someone rear-ended us on the way home from the airport, causing my airbag to deploy. There was really no other damage. In a normal car, this would mean they’d just replace the airbag and be done with it. But my car is literally worth less than the cost of parts and labor for replacing the airbag, so I believe they will total it. This is disturbing mostly because apart from a complete miracle, I will not be able to find another reliable car that gets comparable gas milage for whatever pittance the other insurance company gives me. Well, God will provide something, I’m sure.