🧑‍💻 How I got design back

Book of TREE 1.67

When I was a teenager (1986–93), I wanted to be a cartoonist, then a radio talk show host, then, more than anything, a graphic designer. I was lucky to have parents who encouraged and supported all those dreams. Also when I was a teenager, American Evangelical Christianity decided that simply being a Christian was not good enough. To really get on God’s good side you needed to be “radically saved”. You needed to “Acquire the Fire”. You had to become “FDFX” (a fully devoted follower of Christ). So I did.

I loved it mostly. I liked the conferences and concerts. I liked the sense of belonging to the in crowd. I liked becoming a youth pastor. I liked the sense of relationship I felt with God.

I was part of the raucous, on-the-rise and, frankly, rather fun charismatic wing of evangelicalism. I was also part-time in Bill Gothard’s decidedly less fun but influential home school cult. He had a saying about personal sacrifice: “Others may, but I cannot”. A big theme in his radical message was giving up doing what you loved because it was an idol that got in the way of worshipping God. So I gave up my dream of becoming a graphic designer.

It was fine mostly. I did the things that were seen as valuable in the radically saved culture: preaching, music, drama. I loved doing all those things. But none of them could quite fill the design-shaped hole in my heart.

Note: This takes the edge off the story, but telling the truth is important: I never totally gave it up. I did graphic design for my church as part of my job. It was at church that I learned how to use design software like Photoshop. I drew cartoons for our church bulletin. But that was very much a side thing that served the important stuff which happened on the church stage.

Then in 1999, at the end of the decade of radical salvation, I was vacuuming the church on a Saturday night when – remember I was a radically saved Christian at the time, so that was the paradigm through which I had this experience – God spoke to me internally: “You can have design and art back”. I wept for joy – wet face, ugly sounds, the works – because I was so grateful to have back the things I love, the things that I can’t help but do.

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If you lost a piece of yourself to a religion or culture somewhere along the way, here’s permission: you can have it back.

I very much loved this episode of the Farnam Street podcast about storytelling. What Matthew Dicks says about being descriptive is brunch to raise eyebrows and hackles, but I agree with him.

Grow slowly
Jeff