Tags
artists, desire, endeavors, Endurance, fear, Film, Frustration, Future, God, hope, Jesus, life, Love, perseverance, pushing ahead, The Holy Spirit
Photo taken from here*
I may not have liked the storm, but I learned things from it. I understand things that I didn’t before. The storm that I recently came through from which I lost the budget promised to me for Fear, to losing my vision and consequentially losing my joy was a tough storm but I made it through. I thought I made it through when I wrote “To Despair and Back.” I thought I made it through several other times, but I still suffered from a loss of vision. But now my vision has been renewed and this is what I learned.
When you learn what God put you on this earth for, it does something to you. You learn the very reason that you are person 4,067,158,789 on this planet. When you know this, you develop a God-given vision as you seek Him. As you dwell on Him, you dwell on this journey ahead of you. It becomes so real over time. You keep walking, walking, walking, stepping on each stepping stone he places ahead of you and you walk. But sometimes things happen that are outside of your circumstance. God says step here and you step here. Then the next step seems to fade away.
From an artist’s perspective, vision can be a beautiful thing. No artistic measure is without meaning. Every artistic endeavor has some meaning behind it and that meaning holds close to the beliefs of the artist. When you have an image to bring that meaning out and you are aware of what you are capable of, you begin to get excited and motivated. Emotions start to flow and life is well. But when something hinders that vision, the “feel good” emotions stop, your meaning seems hopeless, and your vision fades as things begin to see impossible.
As my endeavors are directly involving the influence of God, I have some things to add here as well. You get mad at God. You get scared of God. You stop praying because you’re sure you missed him somewhere. Everything seems to fall apart and you remember the sacrifices you made to get there. Problems you chose not to address start bubbling to the surface and you are forced to deal with them. You run out of exciting news for the next person who asks. You seem to have hit a brick wall. You build up this anticipation and you seem to lose your breath. This is why as artists we fall into despair so easily. Artists are visionaries and believe what they envision. If you lose vision, you stop believing. If you rely on God, you want to just walk away and try to do your own thing and try to deal with it on your own without the provision you see as barriers. You want to do things like other people do them. It’s a wasteland.
Photo taken from here*
But to bring this blog back around to its purpose, it can be particularly hard for filmmakers. Psychologists may have a name for this, but if that is certain I’m unaware of it. I’m calling it the “Perfect Paradox.” It doesn’t take long observations of news footage to see that Hollywood is obsessed with perfection. No hair can be out of line without someone jumping to correct it. So as you work in that industry at no matter what level, you begin to develop this eye for an unreachable perfection. Not just with your work, but with your life. You expect a date to go this way and it doesn’t. You expect your day to go like this and it doesn’t. You want the plan to work out just perfectly because you are enslaved to perfect. And when perfect doesn’t come naturally, it causes frustration. You want to walk away from the imperfect and create your own perfect. Furthermore, in my case, I tend to aim for high standards in my work. You want to begin comparing someone’s chapter 20 to your chapter 6. You want to jump ahead and write that inspiring screenplay that will touch the world right before winning the Academy Award. But you can’t quite reach the standard. Then again, perfection. So it is a paradox in your life in what you attempt to achieve after hours on a set and carrying that into your run to the supermarket.
I now understand why artists get upset with God for not putting things they way they would expect or like. I understand why people want to run away and not deal with the issues at hand. I understand why Hollywood celebrities get disoriented under the best of circumstances. And I understand perfection and that we can’t achieve it. We can only achieve an imperfect visual appeasement if such should exist. There’s your paradox.
*The websites in which these photos are found are not necessarily an endorsement from me, but mostly those photos found during a routine image search. I do not own these images.