Pals with the Big G: A Better Way

Happy Christmas and Merry New Year!

I apologize for the increasingly rare updates and the lack of new artwork on this allegedly art-themed blog… one of my New Year’s resolutions is definitely to increase activity on this site!

And for the first time ever, I actually managed to create three unique pieces of art to commemorate our late 2015/ early 2016 holidays! I've been meaning to lend my artistic abilities to my love of the faith for a long while now, so I'm really happy that I finished this piece. Just wanted to do something simple and happy with it and I'm pretty pleased with how it came out, though I may go back and try to add some texture in there at some point....

Anyway, it's hard to believe that the first month of 2016 is already almost over...

To be honest, I've been working on this blog post for the past few weeks, trying to distill what it is I actually want to say. When I came in to work on this latest update to my post, the prior draft was several paragraphs long about a variety of things... the value and meaning of suffering to Christians, the simultaneously simple and vast depth of concept of "neighbor", etc. But in my last post, I had written that I learned the value of brevity when discussing these kinds of things and to make a simple statement that everyone can understand; so here we go...

After much pondering, it is my conclusion that the most important idea of Christianity is this:

"YOU ARE LOVED. WHOEVER YOU ARE, WHERE EVER YOU ARE, WHATEVER YOU'VE DONE, WHATEVER YOU THINK; SO BE HAPPY, HAVE HOPE, AND SHARE THIS LOVE WITH EVERYONE AROUND YOU."

This is a sentiment that Christians should be giving to everyone. To moms, dads, brothers, sisters,to the people in their church, to agnostics, to atheists, to Buddhists, to Muslims, to Christians from other sects, to gay people, to hedonists. Stop putting up walls that divide and generalize, stop keeping count of sins, stop looking at differences as scary or bad- be happy because you are loved and love others because love is greatest when it is shared like a good meal.

Of course, there's so much more I could say about this, but this is the statement I wanted to put out there and that's what I think is important- to tell everyone reading this that they are special, important, and valued by God and whoever you are, where ever you're reading this from- you are deserving of this love.