“What was the one thing you learned in Indonesia that has changed your life forever?”

This was a question I received from Megan at Fried Okra from my last post. Actually Lainey received the question for me during a recent visit, but it’s not really important. The point is I should know better than to invite such questions when there are such sharp-minded people out there willing to ask them. If you haven’t had a dose of Fried Okra yet, I highly recommend it.

The difficulty in answering such a question, for me, is twofold. First, I don’t really know if anything from my trip will be significant to my life 15-20 years down the road. I say this to my own embarrassment: it is entirely too easy for me to get consumed in my day-to-day life/ my culture/ my worries, and forget to look outward. Secondly, anything I say is bound to sound platitudinous.

With those two caveats in place, I’ll attempt to answer the question…

I have two short answers, I think. I can’t narrow it to one.

The first is a quote from JoAnn Van Reeuwyk, one of the American artist I traveled with.

“There’s more water than just what’s in my tank.”

Secondly, I met some great people I hope I’ll continue to have some kind of relationship with. I could, at this point, mention the names of everyone I traveled with, but you can find all the participants here (click the participants links on the side bar). For now I’ll mention Soichi Wantanabe. Soichi is a kind, gentle and extremely peaceful soul. No, I’m not really hitting the mark. He is genuine- in a way I have never encountered before. His paintings are rich, his subject matter is directly out of the Bible. His art is a real challenge to our sensibilities– technically sound, but at the same time might be dismissed as trite or outdated. If you grew up with the Good News Bible, as I did, it’s hard not to harken back to those cartoonish figures when you look at his paintings. Yet his work is not trite. It is genuine. And he’s going to be an artist in residence at Yale this fall, so clearly I’m not the only one who thinks so. Yale is a place where conceptual art is king (naturally), so it’ll be interesting to see how his work is received. I’ve been using some of his images as part of my daily devotionals recently, which has been rewarding–not because it confirms my own view of the scriptures, but it shows me another interpretation. And it challenges my own ideas of what artwork can be/ should be.

That’s it in a nutshell.