As artists, it's tempting to forget the audience's needs. Too often, we're self-centered and self-indulgent in what we share with the world. We're prideful, only showing what we deem as perfect or what we think our peers will respect.

To me, art's highest purpose is to entertain, to enlighten, to inspire, to evoke emotion and to change an audience in some way, big or small.

Whether by a Mack truck or by heart failure or faulty lungs, death happens. But life isn't really just about avoiding death, is it? It's about living.

I, for one, am profoundly grateful to feel the hand of God at work in my life. But at the beginning and end of the day, when my default setting is to show kindness and love to others, I never regret it. And to me, that is what faith is all about.