The short version of this story is that in 2017 I kept hearing a voice inside telling me that I was an artist. It came to me as though it was a name or identity like “Artist” not just a description. Ironically, I had never thought of myself as an artist. I studied pre-medicine, went to medical school and then medical residency and was a practicing doctor when I was hearing all this.
At first I really resisted this calling and identity because it just felt audacious and also because somewhere along the way I picked up a negative connotation about being an artist, probably in part from my family culture of high performance and financial success. To be clear, I have always loved art and when I look back almost all of my best friends were artists, musicians, DJs, etc. I personally held artists in very high esteem. I just didn’t think it was ok for ME to be an artist. Like somehow I would be letting the world down. I was a doctor and that is what I was most useful to the world doing, or so I thought.
My resistance lasted until I went to this personal healing weekend where out of nowhere a woman I had never met came up to me and said, “I think God wants me to tell you that you have the soul of an artist.” Wow. It was the most impactful moment of the weekend and happened in just some random moment that had nothing to do with the weekend’s programming. I sat with that and then finally surrendered.
I told God I was “in” for accepting myself as an artist and that I would go wherever He led. And man, He did not waste any time. He orchestrated a series of events that started with me writing my first commissioned spoken word for a conference two weeks later, led to attending United Pursuit’s School of Worship 2 months after that where I wrote a sketch of what would end up being The History Project EP, and culminated in the studio recording of the actual EP in Jan of 2018 (less than a year from when I first heard “Artist”).
I am still a practicing doctor, hence the “M.D.” And I am still following Him…