The Art of Helping Others by Douglas Mann is subtitled How Artists Can Serve God and Love the World. And it aims to show just that in 3 short parts of 3 chapters each forming a kind of manifesto for artists and creatives who have dreamed of doing something more meaningful, inspiring and exhilarating than leaving the world the way they found it.
In 3 sections—Awareness, Art, Activism—readers discover progressive guidance in deciding, dedicating, and giving all to the master artist and his life-giving call.
Doug Mann is an artist who started much like me or you—living a steady-if-unadventurous life. And yet he made a decision to leave it all behind and follow a whisper in his spirit. He’s now a man motivated by a single, holy ambition—to ignite the passion of the old-world missionaries in new-world creative artists. His sparking mind seeks innovation and simplicity and his stories, like his paintings strike at the injustice in the places and people God set in his path.
Doug’s is a life of one chosen to walk the line between the sacred and our secular modern lives. The line still exists, but it’s grown unclear and hazy from so many years of labeling the great pursuit as occupation boxing everything up into easy categories.
This is no emotional plea or soft-headed pipe dream. This is a logical, faith-driven argument for why giving one’s whole life for Jesus is the only way to truly live. Artists and general Christians will find this work stirring and filling their hearts with fresh love for the simple truth and beauty of our truly revolutionary work.
As Doug points out, art is made of a creative blending of contrasting elements. This book delivers its mix of serving God and loving the world through something Doug calls “creative incitement”—acting on the gospel to transform creative ideas into justice, into courageous movements and revolutions of grace in ordinary people’s lives.
This book is a call to a generation rising to their greatest challenge—to seek and to find meaning in the bleak and the dark. This book reads as preparation for lives yet unknown. Doug is a bold author with an undeniably bold charge.
And I, for one, could not remain unchanged.
I commend him for this rousing, distilled work. May his vision catch fire in readers around the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMmO4GHT0ys
verily, here am i once again aware of satan’s whispers, YOU’LL NEVER BE HOLY like this guy, YOU CANNOT LIVE YOUR LIFE FOR JESUS. YOU ARE TOO SELFISH. MICK, ALSO, HAS SOLD OUT TO CHRIST. BUT YOU WON’T. to this i reply in words of john eldrige:
“I think if we could recover a vision of what holiness actually is, we would be absolutely captured by it. I think we would see it as not only completely desirable, but attainable as well. King David was a man who knew well his character flaws, felt the anguish of regret, spent many a tormented night wrestling with his failings. And yet, in Psalm 119, David wrote this:
“I run in the path of your commands, because you have set my heart free.”
Have you ever put those two things together—freedom of heart and the passionate pursuit of God’s commands? The two go hand in hand. Genuine holiness restores human beings; restored human beings possess genuine holiness.”
so i can give lucifer the raspberries because i AM A RESTORED human being and that’s all i need to know….
LPF, This is brilliant and true. The beauty of your mind…
And you share it so well from that land you inhabit called Humbleseeker Park. I need to spend more time there–maybe spinning on the old tumble-down humble merry-go-round.
You remind me the pursuit of fun, of art, truth, goodness and beauty, they can all be natural responses to the longing in our hearts. In Humbleseeker Park, it’s obvious that pursuing God’s commands *IS* all of those things.
Love, sister, love. You get it.