What are our most powerful weapons against our enemy, Satan, in this world? And why does it seem that we, as Christians, don’t ask this question enough, even though we need to ask it in order to stand a chance in the face of spiritual warfare? It seems like evil’s ammunition dents our armor daily, with school shootings, police brutality, racism and a million other fear-striking matters that plague us becoming more and more prevalent with each week. And yet we, equipped with the very presence of God within us, often sit back, helpless. How do we, the image-bearers of God, react? Zac Benson is fighting back with art.
From March 6 to April 5, Benson, an assistant professor of studio art at Cedarville University in Ohio, is showcasing an exhibit of his artistic work, collectively called “Awakening,” in Union University’s art gallery. This gallery highlights a number of world issues, especially issues to which many Christ-followers have differing reactions. Benson gracefully spotlights these topics that, unfortunately, many Christians flee from discussing.
I strolled into the gallery on a gloomy weekday morning, hallways bare of students and the art exhibit eerily quiet. I began in the middle of the exhibit (which you’re not supposed to do), because my eye was drawn to a piece called “The Cost of War.” The wall was covered with photos of faces, but none could be identified as any one person. Each photograph featured a congressman or congresswoman, overlaid with the faces of several fallen soldiers. I moved as closely to one picture as I could. I wanted to make out the faces, to see the eyes of these heroes, but I couldn’t. There were too many, they’d blurred together, so many lives lost both to my vision and our country.
I began to cry, alone, in the silent gallery. My dad had been deployed to Iraq for 18 months when I was a young girl, his job to diffuse roadside bombs, and I was lucky that his face wasn’t one of those in the sea of human casualties on the gallery wall.
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Aaron Lee Benson, chair of the art department at Union as well as Zac Benson’s father, met my tear-stained face in the gallery, sharing in my emotions not only about this one piece, but about the entire gallery that his son had created. Our attention moved toward the wall cater-corned to “The Cost of War,” a wall lined with flags from end to end, the first being a rainbow flag. Each one following was the same flag, gradually faded, until the final flag was a pure white.
I read the short description by Zac that was next to the piece. Nearly a year ago, a transgender woman was killed, and after hearing the news, Zac’s initial reaction wasn’t what he believed it ought to be.
“[Zac] immediately was convicted by the Holy Spirit,” Mr. Lee Benson said. “He lived with the girl’s picture on his studio wall the whole time he made the piece to say to himself, ‘This is a child of God, regardless of how we’re going to look at the issues that confront humanity.’”
This theme is prevalent in every corner of the gallery, that if we are Christ’s representatives, then how we live and react matters profoundly. At the entrance to the gallery is a wall of used communion cups, symbolizing how we ought to see the world through the blood of Christ. Beside this piece is another wall, filled with small vials of crumbling crosses, the name of a Christian church in China placed behind each vial, representing the crosses being taken down all over their country. On the wall across from “The Cost of War” are the Ten Commandments etched in Hebrew, their modern equivalents underneath each one (such as “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” with “Chick-fil-A”). By the window is a wire Confederate flag, rolled up in the corner.
“I think [Zac], at the very core, wants Union students to wake up to the world they actually live in,” Lee Benson said. “Not to this campus that can so easily become our entire world, that we lose sight of the tragedy and the drama and the joy of the whole world. It’s hard to be Christ or even Christ-like if you’re not awake to what’s going on.”
I left the gallery feeling both convicted and equipped. Convicted, because I realized the issues I’ve refused to confront. Equipped because, as Zac used art as a megaphone, so can my arsenal, if I choose to use it, be potent. I write, and my words matter. Like, really matter, so much so that it expels darkness from every corner it touches. Maybe you’re a nurse. You nourish people, many times at their very worst, and it matters. Or you’re an engineer. You build and you create, and what you construct matters. Or you’re a mom, a professor, a student who hasn’t even declared your major. Your very presence, just because Christ now lives in you more than you live in you, it matters. It’s far more powerful than we could ever think or imagine.
“Excellence is having a sincere voice and not painting pretty pictures,” Lee Benson, said. “Excellence is being aware of the joy of being alive on any given day, that you have 24 hours. Zac has 24 hours. Billy Graham has 24 hours. President Trump has 24 hours. How will we live excellently in the time we’re given? You can’t just continue to make pretty things.”
