The current acceptable rate for an agent is 10% of an actor’s commission. I did not really understand how this works until just recently.

What an agent does for an actor, is look everyday at casting breakdowns. These breakdowns are something like a huge chart of who is casting what and what kind of actors they are looking for. These breakdowns are only accessible by agents. If they find something they think is right for you, they will submit you to audition for the role.

Fast forward months down the line. You’ve been cast in the role, you were brilliant, and now you are stand on stage accepting your Tony Award. Of course you are going to thank your agent. Without him or her doing that work to read the break down and set up that appointment for you, you literally could not have gotten that role.

I believe that, in a way, God acts as our Spiritual Agent. There are breakdowns that only, with his omnipresent eyes can see. There are meetings, appointments, work that is to be done for his Kingdom; and what He does, when we are in communication with Him, and have a good relationship with Him, is He sends us out, He calls us out to these appointments.

He did it with Moses. Moses fit God’s breakdown for the Israelite leader to set them free from slavery. Abraham fit God’s breakdown to be the father to the nations. Paul fit God’s breakdown to be an apostle. Solomon fit God’s breakdown to be the wisest man who ever lived.

Daniel fit God’s breakdown to receive favor from a king in a Godless land. Esther fit God’s breakdown for some who would gain favor with a king to gain freedom and equality for her people. David fit the breakdown for someone to slay a giant. Joseph fit the breakdown to be a dreamer. Even Jonah fit the breakdown to be a prophet to the most evil nation on earth.

Now an actor’s agent will generally only send the actor in for roles that fit his or her “type”. Meaning that if the casting director is looking for a young, tall, blonde, leading lady type, they will not send you in if you’re a short, quirky, character actress.

This is where God’s agency works a little differently. He sends us out for appointments that don’t necessarily fit our spiritual “type”. But we can take comfort in the fact that if God has called us to it, no matter how wrong we may be for the job, we will be fantastic in it because of His power and strength.

So when we stand, after the calling has been fulfilled, we must think back to the time when God called us to it, and realize that it literally could not have happened without his divine appointment that he sent us out for.

Funny enough, we give the Lord a 10% commission as well. 


-jon

The root of all fear is that dreaded question, “What if?” Our fears, no matter how pedestrian, literal, or abstract, all stem from this simple question. “What if she doesn’t really love me?” “What if the test comes back negative?” “What if there’s a monster under my bed?” We get ourselves into a flurry over the hypotheticals of life. And it often prevents us from reaching our pull potential or influence within our circumstances.

Fear is the enemy of any artist. The main fear of the artist is, “What if they don’t like what I’ve created?” The only real solution to this fear is to stop creating all together. So in order to be an artist, there is an inherent risk involved, as you are putting your heart on the line with everything you do.

Fear is also the enemy of any disciple. Just like the artist, it can cripple us from living a life that is fully lived. Nearly thirty times, the Bible tells us, “do no be afraid”. The Lord literally commands us to no be afraid.

Because when we look at our fears, we say “what if”, but when God looks at our fears, He says “so what?”

We worship a God who is the root of all things good, and all of the things that we might be afraid of are subject to His mighty will and power. As it says in Romans 8:31, “If God is for us, who can be against us.”

From God’s perspective, our fears are nothing even to bat an eye at. He knows He is our comforter and protector, that we can find refuge in the shadow of the Almighty. The real question is, do we know that? Are we confident enough in God’s power and God’s love for us that we are able to look our fears straight in the face and say, so what?

What if the “what if” is “what if I’m not good enough”? What if God has called me to something I’m not sure I can handle. Artists and disciples alike are plagued with worry and fear about their inadequacy for their calling everyday. But God’s answer is still the same, “So what?”

In Exodus 4, Moses is called by God is right away expressed his fears of inadequacy. But God pounces on that right away in verse 12 saying, “go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say.” (Exodus 4:12 KJV)

Perhaps you may feel that you don’t have the strength or the talent to overcome your fears and fulfill your calling. But Exodus 4 reminds us that it will never be us who fulfills our calling, but the power and love of God through us.


-jon

Admittedley, I have gotten a bit slow on my upkeep of the blog these past few weeks since school started. I am currently cast in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s classic British comedy, The Rivals, and it is, with pleasure, literally taking over my life. I feel as though God calls us to be excellent in all we do, so I have therefor committed myself completely.

If I’m walking between classes, I will break out the play. Walking to school, I break out the play. Running on the treadmill, laying in bed trying to sleep, eating my dinner, every moment of the day, outside of my morning time with the Lord, has been spend diving in and reflecting on the words in Sheridan’s rich text. After a short three weeks of work, I would not venture to call myself an expert on the character of Faulkland, but I have discovered an unbelievable amount by committing myself to study of the text.

It’s the goal of any actor, to not only read the text and memorize it, but to allow the words to touch his heart, mind and soul. We cannot simply read the lines, but we must interpret them from our point of view and personalize them in a way where we can say them and convince an audience and fellow characters that they are our own. The lines bounce around in my head day and night as I walk down the street repeating them to myself, looking like a crazy person, and constantly searching for new meaning, or deeper meaning.

In all of these ways, the study of an actor’s script is not much unlike our study of God’s word. Or at least what we wish our study of God’s word was like. But if we were honest with ourselves, most often we are just content with reading it. We cannot simply read the lines, however. No great play was every produced from an actor simply reading the lines. How should we expect God’s word to produce any real change in our lives until we go beyond simply reading, and begin to allow the words to touch our hearts, minds, souls, and spirits. We cannot simply read the word, we must understand the word, and live the word. Paul says, do not be only hearers, but doers, this does not come from just simply reading.

Pastor Mark Batterson says it this was, “If you read through the Bible, you’ll get through the Bible. If you pray through the Bible, you’ll get the Bible through you.”


-jon

            At the end of the week it is an overnight camp tradition to take some time to allow the campers to write a letter to them selves. In this letter we hope that they will write about their experience at camp and all the ways that they grew in their relationship with the Lord. We then collect the letters, and send them their letters a few months later as a reminder of where they were on their mountaintop experience.
            During my first year as camp director at high school camp, we were beginning our letter ritual on Friday morning, and I decided to take a seat at the piano and provide some music to help focus our minds on writing. I took my seat, and as soon as I hit my first chord, the power went out in the entire campus. We sat in total darkness.
            As camp director, I would have expected my responsibility radar to go crazy in this moment. After all, in just six short hours we were supposed to be putting up Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in front of three hundred of these camper’s closest family and friends. An event like this usually requires electricity. I probably should have gotten my butt off that piano bench and figured out what we were going to do, but for some reason, hopefully other then my own irresponsibility, I stayed put. The campers all quickly brought out their phones to be used and writing lights, and I began playing worship songs.
            After a few minutes I found myself in a vamp between songs when I heard the strong voice of a male camper emerging from the darkness, “God said let there be light,” he said, “He is a light in the darkness, nothing can ever defeat Him.” I continued to play for a minute or so more before the lights flickered back on, only for a moment, and then went out again. At the time, I didn’t even think of how coincidental his words were, so I continued to play.
            About half an hour went by when one of my fellow counselors informed me that we were still going to the cafeteria for lunch, which was in about five minutes, even though we didn’t have power. Our letter writing time was coming to a close and the majority of the campers had now crawled back into the pews, and were softly singing along with the songs I was playing. I invited them all to stand and join me in one last time of worship before lunchtime. We then launched into Will Reagan’s song Set a Fire, and for a good three minutes we repeated the heavenly mantra, “There’s not place I’d rather be, then here in Your love”. And as I let the final chord ring out through the rafters of the chapel and up into the heavens I lifted my hands and began to pray. “Lord, we lift up a shout of praise—“ and, click. Before I could go any further, the lights came back on with a thud, and this time, they were on to stay.
            I sat there for a split second with my hands in the air still, deciding that there was nothing left to say, that God deserved the last word with His miraculous act. “Amen!” I proclaimed, “Go to lunch!”
            It was indeed a miraculous moment. I wish I could say that I was confident the whole time that the Lord would turn the lights back on, but I’m just not that spiritual I guess. One thing I learned though, was in that half hour, God wanted to do two things, focus our hearts for reflection, which is why He turned off the lights, and show how amazingly real He is, which is why, and how He turned them back on.
            I think there are many places in our lives where we need the power to go out. In the world we live in, with cities like New York City and Las Vegas, where electric lights shine twenty four hours a day, we can easily be deceived that we are constantly living in the light. But when there is a power outage in New York, the world experiences the fear of true darkness. Those of us who are in Christ however, know the illusion that elextric light creates, and live above and beyond it. Without electric light to guide us into distractions and earthly things, we are only left with the heavenly light of Christ and the fellowship and closeness of our brothers and sisters in the church.
            Camp, for me, over the years, has been a turning off of the lights. It’s a chance to lose power of the real world for a week and sit in the darkness, allowing the light of Christ to flow in and through me again. It is because of this story that now, at least once I week I do my quiet time in the dark by candle light, praying that the same flame that keeps the candle burning would ignite my soul in it’s pursuit of a strong relationship with Christ.


-jon

I sat in a lecture the other day in my acting for the camera class that got me thinking. In speaking about rehearsing for the camera, my professor said this, “Rehearsing for the camera is more like farming, less like hunting.”

What he meant was that for great camera acting to exist, you cannot simply hunt for emotion, you have to plant seeds of images and memories during rehearsal, in hopes that you will reap a harvest of something real while you’re shooting.

As soon as the term planting seeds was brought into the conversation, my ears immediately perked up. I got to thinking far beyond the camera and began to ponder about how we as Christians live our lives.

America is the world capitol of the quick fix. Numerous microwaves in every household, faster and faster internet, remotes that control literally everything in our houses, and if any of these things break, of course we’ll just buy a new one. We’d like to think that we’ve advanced past our hunter gatherer ancestors, but the truth of the matter is, we still live our lives with a hunting mentality, and we expect our lives with Christ to be the same way.

Paul speaks about the idea of spiritual milk and meat a few times throughout the New Testament. These are the good gifts of God, the fruit of the Spirit that will empower and enable us to live a more God-centered life. Our problem most often is not that we don’t desire to be spiritually fed, the problem is that we want to be fed and satisfied right now. We want to hunt down spiritual growth, stab it with a spear, make it our own, and get back to watching television.

We are all well aware of spiritual hunting habits. This is when you read your K-Love verse of the day online and call it your quiet time. This is when your “year long devotional book” is entering into it’s fourth year of new use. This is when we don’t go to church so you make up for it by listening to the sermon podcast while you get ready for work in the morning. Don’t get me wrong, daily verse reminders, devotional books, and podcasts are all wonderful resources, but they cannot stand alone as our only means of spiritual growth.

The reason Jesus uses so many farmer metaphors in the gospel’s is because cultivating a relationship with God, just like any other relationship, is a process. A relationship requires time spent together, and seeds of trust, love, and commitment that are planted early and allowed to grow over months and years.

We must cease this spiritual hunting. It does not satisfy our needs, nor does it help to form a lasting relationship with our Creator. Let us be farmers together, who not only plant seeds in others, but also plant seeds of growth within ourselves in order to further our commitment to God, and desire to know Him better.


-jon

A writer friend of mine gave me a commission a few weeks ago, or better yet, a challenge, to write something that tugs at my heartstrings, something that makes me cry. The belief is, that there are connecting threads that connect every single heart or every single person in this world, and if you were to tug on that thread, you would get a gut reaction from everybody. Therefore, there are stories that can speak to everyone, regardless of background, politics, religion, race, or creed. This was my challenge.

Thinking about this recently has brought me to the assumption that everyone, all of us, are looking for something, or someone to believe in. We are all looking for the thing that inspires us, that gets our blood pumping, the thing that makes us feel as though we are making a difference, this is called our dream or our calling. We are also looking for acceptance and connection beyond a human level, where we feel loved and safe, this is the someone we believe in, the soul mate, or the best friend.

At the root of these desires however, is something even greater, something even larger, the most recurring theme in all of human history, reconciliation. I believe we as human beings have an innate desire for reconciliation, and the reasons are many.

One, is simply because we are born into our own sin nature, we are born into brokenness. When we do wrong, we experience isolation, and when we are truly convicted of that wrong, we desperately desire someone to hold onto, someone to tell us it’s alright, someone to stamp our reconciliation. It is a desire that our new century, do it yourself, culture is trying to thwart with it’s idea of just simply accepting one’s faults instead of endeavoring to correct and reconcile them. But this is where every single moment of the Biblical narrative is pointing, and therefore it is the path that God is constantly forging in the world.

His command to bring his Kingdom and make disciples is to bring more people to reconciliation. ‘Getting saved’ is not some cheap way of getting in to heaven, it is a reconciliation with the Father, where you realize that you are not alone, and that you are accepted and loved. The brokenness you were born into is then gone. This is a word that not only means repairing a wronged relationship, it is a welcoming into a life of hope that reveals the reality that we are never truly alone.

The fear of being alone is number three on the list of what humans are most afraid of. But I would argue that it is really number one, because number one is public speaking. What is so scary about public speaking? That fact that you are alone in front of hundreds of people. Number two is death, what is so scary about death? The uncertainty of where you’re going and if you’ll ever see anyone again. Will you be alone, you ask. We dread being alone, because we have, stitched into the very fibers of our being, a heart strand that beats to be reconciled, to know that we are not alone.

This is why the story of a broken relationship between a father and son being repaired speaks to so many of us. That is why fifteen-year-old girls and sixty year old men alike will cry at the end of the movie, because reconciliation has occurred, and when you witness true reconciliation, you have witnessed pure holiness. There is something truly other worldly about it.

If we desire to create art that speaks to people where they are right now, we need to begin to think in this way. We need to begin to ask ourselves, what are the innate desires of the human heart, and how can I discuss them and bring them to light using my talents? This is how come we have works of art that are so-called timeless. Because our rooted, basic human desires do not change. That is how great plays are written, that is how award winning films are made, that is how photographers become famous, that is what makes an artist’s life’s work as worth while as a businessman or a missionary. We have gifts that can shine a light and hold a mirror up to the human soul like nothing else can. We have the ability to pluck the strings of the human heart back into action, by reviving it’s deepest, sometimes lost, desires. But we must ask ourselves what they are first.

-jon