great art

"Sometimes, you know, you try to pray, try to impress God with all the right words... and I just don't think it's all that easy to impress God Almighty. Here's the thing that I think we often forget--that we don't have to impress Him. He's already knocked out about you. He already loves you more than you can imagine.

"I remember reading a thing that Picasso once said. I like to read what famous artists have to say because I can barely look at their paintings without going into a coma, trying to figure out what it's about. But he said this one thing that I really did like... he said, 'Good taste is the enemy of great art,' which I think is very, very true. Good taste has all to do with being cultured and being refined. If art has to do with anything, it has to do with being human. And one of the reasons that I love the Bible is because the humans in the Bible are not very refined. They're pretty goofy, if you want to know the whole truth about it.

"And I remember when I was a kid, people would always say to me... because I was one of those typical, depressed, adolescent types. I wrote poetry and stuff! That's how morose I was as a kid. People would go around saying, 'Oh cheer up, man because God loves you.' And I would say, 'Big deal! God loves everybody. That don't make me special. That just proves that God ain't got no taste.'

"And I don't think He does. Thank God... because He takes the junk of our lives and He makes the greatest art in the world of it. And if He was cultured, if he was as civilized as most Christian people wish that He was, you'd be useless to Christianity. But God is a wild man, and I hope that in the course of your life, you encounter Him. But let me warn you... you need to hang on for dear life... or let go for dear life."

~Rich Mullins