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# How Art Found Me
- URL: https://www.trentonlaffoon.com/how-art-found-me/
- Published: 2026-08-24T01:53:38.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-24T01:53:38.000Z
- Author: Trenton Laffoon

I never went looking for design. That’s the part I have trouble explaining to people who assume every creative career begins with a kid who always knew. I didn’t always know. I was going to be a sports broadcaster — then, my path led to pastoral ministry. A creative career was never part of my plan. If you would have told me that I’d spend my life making things on a screen, I would have laughed.

And yet here I am. And it has really made me step back and acknowledge a valuable truth: that I didn’t find art and creativity at all. **It found me.**

We’ve lost a good word for this, and traded it for a worse one. The modern instruction is to *find your passion* — as though your calling were an object hidden somewhere out in the world, and your task were to hunt it down, sample enough things, chase it until you finally catch it. But there’s an older word that points the opposite direction. *Vocation,* from the Latin *vocare* — to call. A vocation is not something you find. It’s something that *calls* you. The initiative belongs to the thing, not to you. You don’t track it down; you hear it, and you answer. Which makes the whole posture different. You are not a hunter closing in on a prize. You are someone being summoned — and your only real job is whether or not you say yes. This is the essence of how God works in our lives and careers. 

Looking back, art had been calling me for years, in a voice so quiet I didn’t recognize it as a voice at all. It just looked like the things I did when no one asked me to. I was interning at a church, focused on learning ministry, but I kept — making things. Graphics. Videos. I’d redesign a set nobody had assigned me. I’d stay late nudging the spacing on a slide that was already fine, because *fine* bothered me in a way I couldn’t yet explain. At the time I filed it under “helping.” I had no other category for it. It genuinely never occurred to me that the thing I reached for in every unclaimed hour might be trying to tell me something about my calling. 

Then I went into ministry full time and embraced what I thought was the answer to the call — and in a sense it was, just not the way I pictured. Because even inside ministry, the making kept surfacing. As a youth pastor, I made branding, graphics, fun videos, and designed environments—all to fulfill my ministry calling. As an executive pastor, I managed budgets and staff and preached on Sundays, all the things the role required. But the part that lit me up, the part I’d have done for free — and routinely did — was building the creative side of it. The brand. The visuals. The way the whole thing *looked and felt* to a stranger walking through the doors for the first time. I was a pastor who kept unintentionally being a designer. The true vocation was patient with me. It just kept showing up in the margins, waiting for me to finally turn around and see it standing there.

And I want to be honest about the pace of it, because we love a lightning-bolt story and mine wasn’t one. There was no single moment when the clouds parted and I *knew.* It was slow. Methodical, almost. A love that grew in me a little at a time, over years — so gradually that I couldn’t name the day it became undeniable. It didn’t help that I had no formal training, no design degree, no permission slip that said I was allowed to call myself a designer. Art didn’t come to me through the front door of credentials. It came in through the side door of simply doing it, again and again, until one day the side door turned out to be the main entrance all along. I’ve come to realize that’s how the truest things usually arrive — not as a thunderclap, but as a slow warming, a thing you glance up at one ordinary afternoon and realize has quietly become the center of your life while you were busy planning something else.

What grew alongside the love of making was a love of *why it works* — and this is where my faith stopped sitting beside my craft and became the root of it. Somewhere in those years I started to see something I can’t unsee: *that visual creativity is one of the primary ways meaning moves between human beings.* A film that undoes you in the dark. A photograph that stops your scroll and holds you there against your will. A room designed so well you feel something before you can name it. Type set with such care that the words themselves seem to mean more. None of that is decoration. It is *communication* — meaning made visible, carried from one soul to another through a made thing.

And I came to believe — this is the conviction underneath everything I do — that this is not merely a trick of human cleverness. It’s a fingerprint. God is, first and most fundamentally, a maker; the entire story opens with an act of creation. And he has never stopped communicating through what’s made — and, more astonishing to me, *through people.* Using a creative director like me, an aspiring filmmaker curating short films, and a kid painting in his parents’ garage as instruments to say something true, or beautiful, or both, to someone who needed to receive it. You don’t have to share my faith to feel the weight of that idea. But once I saw it, I could no longer treat design as a job. It had become a way of participating in something far older and larger than my own small career.  

Which is why, to this day, I live *inspired* — and I mean that almost literally. The word comes from *inspirare,* to breathe into. To be inspired is to have something breathed into you from beyond yourself. This is what God does in our lives. He breathes life, creativity, and meaning into each of us. And it’s up to us to recognize Him in the details of our life.

Inspiration isn’t something you manufacture — it’s something you *receive,* and staying open enough to be genuinely moved by God is a discipline, and it may be the thing that brings you into your true calling.