An army of mercenaries who are working with diligence while everyone else is sleeping, an outpouring of story into the river that circles the earth for people to come and drink, to bend down before the waters and lift it up to their mouths, to wash the dirt from their faces, living water offered to us and now offered to all through us.
And for the artist, what can we do but obey in obedience? The calling has come to us not to be ignored or transformed into a path of temporary riches and pleasure, but the calling has come to be obeyed, to be pursued to the end, the end of us, the end of the earth, the end of where we believe we are capable of going so that we can come to find all ends are the beginning of something else.
The water trade is dangerous.
Where men come to drink is what we have always been fighting over. Who owns the river where they come and drink? What is in the water? And when it enters their mouths and fills their bodies, how will they be transformed?
We are talking about power. We are talking about story. We are talking about living water.
Power will either be founded upon fear or upon love, fear wielded like a sword that cuts humanity into groups, these people, and these people, and then these people, and now your job is to blame one another for everything that ails the world and then fight to the death—that is power built on fear. The one holding the blade holds the power because he manipulates emotion, the thoughts that are not real become real and war fills the land.
But we the dangerous ones, the artists whose blade is a story, have the chance to wield a different kind of power – the power to spark memory. The power founded not in fear but in love, love for our fellow man not because of their skin color or their nationality or their ideology, but love because they bear the image of the God who made us and is making us still, we the men and women of this time and place.
You will face opposition. The dangerous artist who offers living water will be ignored, and then he will be despised, and then he will be silenced, and then he will be crushed, but the very thing that makes him dangerous also makes him eternal. Power built on love. Not on fear. And there is no fear in love.
Mao once said power grows from the barrel of a gun but they all said it, each one of them, and your enemies are singing it still, crying out over the nations, power grows from the barrel of a gun so just find out who is holding the gun to know who is in power, make sure it’s you my comrades, that is the song of death that is still rising, the song we must work to put down with a different power, a power that grows out of the power of our origins, righteousness, the memory of who we are.
We need dangerous artists.
We need living water.
Become dangerous by wielding the power not that grows out of the barrel of a gun, but out of the grave that has been overcome.