Earlier this week, I joined a Facebook group for writers. Coincidentally, they are hosting a link-up in which they’ve asked members to answer the following questions:

How does faith influence your art? What role does it play? Does your faith have implications in what you write?

My immediate answers were simple, but the more I’ve thought about the questions, the more complicated my answers have become.

My first response was that all of my art…my writing, my music…revolves around my faith.

But that’s not completely true.

Since childhood, elements of faith have been at the core of who I am. Naturally, my art is often a result of me searching for meaning and the handiwork of God in everything. However, more often, my art is a result of something much more rigid and controlling: religion.

I spend day after day struggling and wrestling with my faith.

I’ve discovered this week that my art is where my struggle between faith and religion is revealed. It’s where I bring to the light the dark battle between faith in God and the prison of religion that rages inside me.

For me, even the process of creating art often requires faith; yet, the shackles of religion that constrain me keep me from exercising that faith.

In the moments when I create art from a place of faith, I sense my purpose of existence. It’s then that I’m free to extend grace and mercy. It’s then that my heart beats strong words of hope for the religiously oppressed and weary. It’s then that I abandon the self-defeating religious mantra that repeatedly plays in my head, and instead, become an encourager. It’s then that my art flows fom my heart and beats with His.

To read more posts on this topic, search Twitter #faithartlife.