Indy Trip 2015: Karitos

Karitos Indy 2015

Karitos brings together artists of all types – musicians, dancers, writers, painters, actors, and everything in between. We have breakout sessions on our area of interest, but all get together for large sessions to be all artsy together. It’s also a Christian conference, so the best part is we learn about glorifying God in and through our art, as well as life. I love that there’s this comraderie of we’re-all-in-this-together instead of a spirit of competition and narcissism (quite common among creatives, even myself.) Such a refreshing retreat! I am mostly writer, so most of the sessions I went to were about writing.

My favorite parts were the general sessions all together, but I appreciated a lot of other parts. I came up with a blogpost idea from Paul Lloyd’s Blogging session. It will be titled “How to Find the Circus.” Be looking for that in the near future 🙂 He also gave lots of ideas for content to publish – I’m toying with the idea of making some vlogs because of his session, even though I’m even less videogenic than I am photogenic. We’ll see.

Leanzar Stockley’s worship session continued his theme from last year, on loving others and reconciliation. He reminded us that our art is for God and others – we dance or write or paint or sing for others.

In Donna Cherry’s “Taking It to the Streets” she said everywhere she goes, she assumes she’s sent. So refreshing to remember wherever I am, God has me there for a reason. Living with expectation. She also talked about a healing that happened through her, though she wasn’t even praying for healing. Just with an unintentional touch. She said we shouldn’t think that God will only work through us when we’re trying to have Him work through us. So true. It made me think of the woman healed by touching Jesus’ cloak. And He said, “Who touched me? I felt power go out from me.” JESUS unintentionally healed, why not us?

Finally, in Tim Swain’s Spoken Word session, it was fun to play with spoken word and presentation – as well as his exortation to make writing excellent, because Christians tend towards “If it’s for God, it doesn’t have to be quality.” Ughhhhh, that’s one lie that irks me from Christian culture. Don’t think that you can slide by in mediocrity because you have the stamp of Jesus approval on your work. Excellence is so key. Tim Swain said, “They’ll respect your art before they respect your message.”

One of my favorite parts of Karitos is getting to know other artists, other stories, other dreams. Here’s Linda Harris-Iorio’s artwork that was displayed and/or painted right there – her connection with God’s heart is so encouraging.

I’m so pumped for the big event – Karitos Retreat in Chicago. Cause one Karitos just isn’t enough 🙂 Come join me! After Karitos ended, we headed to finish our scavenger hunt (come back for tomorrow’s post.)