Artists are emotional, it’s what enables them to be good artists. They are brave enough to be vulnerable while the rest of us view it as a weakness, something we’re too good to exhibit, so cut him some slack here. He’s being honest. Damned if it isn’t raw, but it’s honest.

I’ll be forthright: I don’t care about the Kanye presidential bid. I’m not following any polls related to it, I’m not watching to see if he installs a ground structure for canvassing, I’m not treating it like a serious story none of it. I’m also not looking to crown a new messiah. I do care that this guy spoke out against infanticide and witnessed using his own personal story, which is powerful. As I’ve said to some, I think he’s still in the process of developing his relationship with Christ (aren’t we all?). I like to encourage rather than heavily criticize others in the battle of leaving their former selves behind and taking up the yoke of Christ. I wrote about this in my last book, Grace Canceled. If you find your patience tested with this, look to how Jesus handled the Sons of Thunder. They weren’t perfect, but He corrected where necessary and encouraged. In the Bible, James and his brother John were impetuous, first favoring fire and brimstone as penalty instead of first leaning to grace. I wrote:

By all accounts, in the beginning James and John were brawlers, rough men, young in faith and rich in zeal. They were no-nonsense and—as demonstrated by a couple of incidents in the Bible—short on grace and mercy. In Luke 9:49–50 John tells Jesus, “Master, we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he is not one of us.” Jesus corrects him and says, “Do not stop him, for whoever is not against you is for you.” It’s a strategy I’ve often heard wisely repeated in various forms within Republican politics, but one I’ve not seen followed lately. In the past, I have been guilty of not following it myself. Reagan’s “Your 80-percent friend is not your 20-percent enemy” echoes this wisdom in a way.

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Later in Luke 9, as Jesus travels to Jerusalem, he sends messengers ahead of him to a Samaritan village. But the villagers will have none of it, because Jesus is heading to Jerusalem first. When James and John see this, Luke 9:54 says that the “sons of thunder” asked Jesus, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?” Jesus rebukes them, and they all travel to another village. These two headstrong disciples didn’t stay that way; they were changed by their mission. James was the first of the twelve disciples to be martyred, and John was later known as the Apostle of Love. They were changed by God and learned that their mission to persuade hearts and minds and save souls was bigger than any power they were later granted authority to use. They were prepared for the bigger responsibility that awaited them later in life.

If the men whom Jesus called the “sons of thunder” could change, then surely we can also. James and John were certainly not weakened by their shift toward grace, but rather showed an inner strength and humility in their conversions of heart. It is those with weaker characters who lack grace and mercy, people who are too sensitive to the perceptions of others, and who fear being thought of as weak or compromising. This is the root of social justice.”

Jesus didn’t remove James and John from the group because they were a draft version of the final form Jesus knew they could be; Jesus recruited them knowing their nature and their potential. I wrote in my book: “He nurtured them, encouraged them, taught them, led them, shepherded them into the saints they ended their lives as. Again, “God doesn’t call the equipped, he equips the called.”

I bring this up because I get the same feeling when I see stuff like the Kanye video. Some people say he’s crazy, other says he’s convicted. I’m not convinced that enough people in the world are able to recognize real pain from theater anymore, we’re all too cynical and dispirited. That said, I will never question God’s ability to use Whomever He wants when He wants and if someone is having a public spiritual reawakening, then yeah, I guess that might look crazy to a godless world. I might at that point ask who is the one truly crazy — the person having the public, messy spiritual conversion or those who reject a close relationship with a loving and everlasting God for favor of the temporal world?

 

“Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.” – Charles Addams