Hungary Update

Hungary:

As you may remember from previous updates, I spent most of the month of July traveling with an OM Arts team in Hungary. Every time I go out on one of these trips, I learn to appreciate more and more the value of getting out of the office and seeing what exactly all of my IT work at OM USA is actually supporting.

You may also remember that, as we were planning the trip, there were a lot of questions about what exactly we would be doing. I'm learning that this is pretty common – you set your goals and make your plans and collect your materials, and then you hit the ground on the first day and discover what God is really planning for this trip! Goals and plans and preparations are necessary, but you learn to hold on to them with an open hand!

One quick story:

Our OM Arts team was made up of six visual artists working along side the music and dance teams. I will never cease to be amazed at the caliber of people God brought on that team, and how He molded us together in the couple of weeks we spent together! We had a couple of main objectives as we were in the city of Baja (pronounced: Boy-ah). The first one was teaching art classes in the small English school there, and developing friendships with the students. Another main objective though was to create a large scale piece of art which would be a part of the final concert in the main town square of Baja on Friday evening... and be able to do it in five minutes on stage! The concert would bring together music, testimonies, dance and art as a complete presentation of the message of the Gospel. To that end, we spent a lot of time at the start of the week praying for the specific message that the Lord wanted us to communicate with the people of Baja.

The sense that we got was a message of how God takes our brokenness – through sin in and around us and all the wear and tear of this life – and somehow transforms that into beauty. He doesn't always "fix" things in our lives, but He takes those things and transforms them into something that makes us whole, strong and even beautiful. The word we found in Hungarian which best communicated this transformation was, "Csodálatos", which means full of wonder and beauty and awe. It even has the sense of birth and new life. We decided to do the piece as a "graffiti wall", a canvas around 5 feet by 12 feet, which we could do with spray paint and multiple layers of stencils and free hand painting. On Friday (after a LOT of scrambling to pull together all the details), we were able to actually get the "wall" up on stage at the end of the concert, and do the entire piece while Bill Drake and his band played behind us. When we were done, Bill explained the message behind the piece, and then invited people to come up and put their hand prints in paint on the wall as a visible statement of their commitment to be a follower of Jesus.

There were a lot of the students from the school who came up to add their hand prints to the wall, as well as some others from the audience. I was busy behind the stage taking care of some of the stencils and materials we had used to make the piece, but when I came back around the corner to the front of the stage and saw the wall and all the hand prints there, I was struck by the thought that each one of those prints represented a person, a life, a story of someone who was making a step forward. Each of those steps were different – some were probably more serious or thought out than others – but each was still a step. It was more than just a pretty piece of art up there on stage. It was God using art to communicate the deeper message of His Love to the people of Baja.