Living
Creatively
Two little brothers shared the same room, and every night the smallest one fell out of bed, arousing the whole household in his trauma. It happened so often that the events became common breakfast-time conversation. After listening quietly for some time, the older boy finally offered his opinion, "Want to know why Timmy falls out of his bed every night? He goes to sleep too close to where he gets in."
Many people have Timmy's problem. They go to sleep too close to where they got in. Dull of spirit, they feel uninteresting, and act that way too, because they went to sleep where they were, and life has grown smaller and smaller.
If I were to ask you how much wealth you had gained in the last five years, what would you say? Inner wealth, I mean. The furnishings inside that are beautiful, interesting, and enriching to others. Some people are like the two men I saw in a cartoon: one said to the other, "By the time I was smart enough to know where I was going I wasn't going any place."
Of all people in the world, the people who claim to know God ought to be the most creative simply because they are related to the Creator. He is the innovator, the creator, the artist. Imagination finds its source in Him.
Imagine being there when "the morning stars sang together"
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as the world was created by the word of His power. He shaped birds with their various plumage; He designed the hippopotamus and the giraffe. Light, dark, sun, moon, water, sky, clouds, earth, trees — the rose. And man in His own image.
He let Adam be a word partner with Him by naming the animals. He designed the high priest's robe and the mercy seat, and equipped the artisans with His Holy Spirit. He told Solomon how to carve out the lilies at the top of the columns in the temple. This is our God.
God, the creative Redeemer — who invades our planet to deliver us from our sins and the fear of death — comes not with trumpets and royal fanfare, but as a baby. God, the adventurer.
Did you know that twenty-five percent of the Bible is poetry? In the last part of Job, when God speaks He gives thirty-four verses about the crocodile and ten verses to the glory of the hippo. No wonder G.K. Chesterton wrote "God may be younger than we are!"1
He has never grown tired of His world. The elements are created in such a way that each sunset is an original and each snowflake is different. Every baby born is a unique person. God is forever creating and enjoying His creation. The worst thing in the world, says Clyde Kilby commenting on the creative process, is to believe that today is like yesterday.
God notices; He is observant. The Bible says He knows when a sparrow falls. Are you not of more value than they? He keeps on creating in our personal lives too. He takes all the mistakes, all the broken places and weaves the threads of our lives into something meaningful, as we trust Him.
True creativity is always linked with God. It is part of the adventure to which God calls us. Just living in fellowship with this kind of God is the greatest of creative adventures.
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As we listen and obey, the Holy Spirit infuses into us a likeness to Jesus Christ.
Paul Tournier says, "He calls us to an adventure of faith, difficult and exacting, but full of poetry, of new discoveries, of fresh turns and sudden surprises."
Then why are some of us so small? you ask. Our smallness comes from the desire to "play it safe." Never take any risks. Never make a new decision or trust God in a fresh commitment. We look at our own resources and say, I could never do that. Our scared littleness keeps us in a box.
Adventure or creativity — whichever word you like best — always involves risks. It involves a decision; it is purposeful; it is an expression of yourself. Usually it involves others. It stretches you, so that you end up being more than you ever thought you could be. It adds the special flavor to life that makes you feel that you have a secret with God.
At this point you may be thinking of the composition of an exciting piece of music, or a new harmonic arrangement, or a painting, or a poem. And you've already said, "I can't do that." Then don't do that. Find something your own size. It may be learning how to knit; it may be flying a kite on a hillside with your son and getting the tail just the right length so that it will soar out of sight in the blue, blue of the spring sky.
Creativity is taking the stuff of life that exists and shaping it. It is to be for the moment a spark of communication between God and man, reflecting some small piece of His creative nature.
Some of my adventures do no even remotely resemble painting a picture, but they have been big experiences that demanded creativity and resources I didn't know I had. The first wilderness canoe trip into Canada was one of these. My husband and I in one canoe; our son, Mark, and Bill, one of
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"our boys," in another. An untried river; the equipment and the right amount of food; the skills necessary for survival. When we came to our first cataract (which looked like a giant waterfall to me), I wanted to turn around and go back. Three men let me know firmly that you don't go back on trips like this; we were committed to the river. Often when there seemed no route suitable for portage, I heard my husband say, "Pick up the end of the canoe and follow me."
The black flies ate my husband until he looked measly; the mosquitoes nourished themselves on Bill until he swelled out of shape. It rained; we fought our way through log jams, paddled for hours through marsh lowlands. But there were other days. The sun shone, and a whole beautiful world was reflected in the river. No sound, except for the song of the wind in the top of the pines, eighty to a hundred feet tall, and the dip of paddles in the stream. Birds — cedar waxwings, Canada jays, yellow warblers, redstarts. The otter, the moose, the sunset over the lake, the loon's call, the softness of decaying forest underfoot, the splendor of undisturbed wilderness. Lord, I thought, You made all of this and it was here praising You long before we discovered it. Thank You for sharing it with us.
That's one kind of adventure. I wouldn't have missed it! But I would never have gone if I hadn't taken the risk, and I might never have gone if I had known the cost in sheer endurance and misery. Think of what I might have missed!
Some people don't have children because they are too busy counting costs, evaluating the risks, and weighing the odds of failure. They will never know what they missed! No one marveling at a child conceived in love, nurtured in the mother, bearing the likeness of both parents can doubt the worth of that kind of creativity.
Excuse me for placing canoe trips and having children in
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the same category, but I meant to observe that some people are scared of anything that doesn't have a certain end and doesn't have all the risk removed. No one can really live like that. Life itself is a risk. Yet I am surprised at the number of people who never try anything new. A new recipe. (It may not be good!) A new hairstyle. (I may not like it!) A new game. (I don't know how to play.) A new place. (I've never been there before.)
Come weal or come woe
My status is quo.
We seek a smooth path, without any brambles or stones in the way, a straight way without too much incline that leads us to heaven quite safely. On the other hand, God, the great Adventurer, leads us over high peaks, across rocky crags, up steep ravines, across rivers we thought we couldn't cross, and gets us to heaven all breathless, bearing the fruit of our effort and the likeness of His Son — and fit for royal fellowship.
Eric Berne, author of Games People Play, says, "Losers spend their lives thinking about what they're going to do. Winners, on the other hand, are not afraid to savor the present, to unpack their books, and to listen to the birds sing. Losers say but and if only. Winners are enlightened people who grow rich, healthy, strong, wise, and brave using just three words in life: Yes, No, and Wow."
We need positive attitudes to live creatively. We cannot be encumbered by past failures. The Scripture reaffirms this by urging us to "put off" and "press on." Our sensitive egos may still smart from a risk we took that left us bruised. Bruisings of this kind come most often when the adventures have been our own selfish plans rather than true acts of creativity. But remember God is still the author of new beginnings.
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I do not speak lightly of taking risks. For some people, telephoning someone else is a great adventure and risk. Introducing someone can be exceedingly painful for others. These are extremes of the spectrum, but they exist. And for such the status is not so much "quo" as human safety. But we are not left to that. An infinitely creative God wants to take us out of our smallness into an adventure suitable for us. We need a positive attitude to begin. We can do it, by His grace.
I'm thinking of such an adventure in my own life. God had brought a woman into my life who was an incipient alcoholic. When life's dreariness or her personal disappointment became too much, she took to the bottle and was out of sight for days. She became a Christian and her life changed radically, and the community of those who loved her had almost forgotten, if they had even known, about her problem. Then one day a neighbor innocently said something that hit a vulnerable spot in my friend; she became angry and hurt and went home.
The neighbor tried to call, other friends tried to contact her. No answer. Her car sat in the drive, but no one could reach her. On the second day the fear grew that she may have returned to the bottle. It was decided that I was to go to her home. My assignment was a rescue adventure with God, but I was a Jonah at heart. She lived in the country and had two enormous police dogs that usually met the car. I never left my car until she would call them off. Would she be there to call them off? I didn't want to go; I was scared; I didn't know what to do once I got there. My husband prayed with me and shoved me out of the house. When I arrived the dogs miraculously weren't outside; I knocked on the door; she answered and fell weeping into my arms, asking, "How do you know if God forgives you?" I was so glad I went!
I did not have a positive attitude toward any detail of the adventure,
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but I did have a positive attitude toward God, and that is a good place to begin. And I think the illustration points out one other helpful detail: namely, the role of encouraging friends. We can encourage others to take the risk of living creatively.
A positive attitude is inspired by a spirit of thankfulness. One of the most creative exercises a woman can do is to write a weekly theme entitled, "Why I am thankful." Thankfulness changes our negatives to positives, and transforms our liabilities to abilities. A student once wrote a thankful essay for my friend Betty Carlson. It read, "I am thankful for my glasses. It keeps the boys from fighting me and the girls from kissing me."
We need a positive attitude and a spirit of thankfulness, but we also need to uncomplicate our lives. We build stress into our own lives. I'm not suggesting that we leave the sink full of dirty dishes while we enroll in an art class, but we do need to take a careful look at our lives. The details will be different for everyone, but for most it will mean planning ahead to make our lives more orderly and disciplined. There are only twenty-four hours in any one day; make them as meaningful as possible. We waste useful energy with self-absorption which would be better spent on being creative.
Except for a few who are able to shut themselves off from the world, our creativity must be flexible, not selfish, and subject to interruption. Particularly is this true of women who have children at home. And if you are truly creative, you will consider even the interruptions creative.
Sometimes our creativity passes through times of darkness when some of our dross is being burned off. You may be in one of those times now as you read this. Nothing has sparkled for you for quite a while. Again, return to faith in a God who sponsors personal adventure and He will help you begin.
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What might some of these adventures be? It could be as simple and big an adventure as honesty with a friend. No more role playing, but the risk, the commitment to be who you really are. Real honesty requires integrity. There is a fake kind of honesty popular today that lets people think they have the right to tell a person (with a bit of disguised anger) all the things about that individual offensive to them. It's a way of saying, "I don't like lots of things about you, so why don't you do something about it." And it's a neat cop-out for learning to love. Real honesty might well work on an offensive habit with another person out of love, but it won't make another person unduly responsible for personal hangups.
For instance, Sally goes to Anne and says, "I have something against you. I'm jealous of you." What does Anne do? Can she negate everything in herself that makes for the jealousy? No, but Anne can take Sally's false attempt at honesty and make it creative by helping her to bear her own burden before God. That's at least a creative response.
The creative risk of adventure in honesty that I first suggested is that of simply letting yourself be known in ways that are free and constructive for you and everyone else. It will undoubtedly include the interchange of letting others help bail you out of your hurts and doing the same for them. A large part of living creatively is reaching outside of yourself to help someone else.
Learning to listen helps creative living. Listening may well be second only to loving as a creative act. Listening says so much to the other person about her value. (That's why listening to small children is so important.) But listening lets you hear and know the other person, and you may be surprised at the totally new ideas you encounter.
I read recently of a man who said he had never been bored with anyone.
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When he began to feel tired of a person, he began to ask, "What is there about the life of this person that makes him so boring?" And by the time he had finished asking questions and listening to them explain themselves he was no longer bored.
The combination of honesty and listening could be a whole new adventure in quality married life for some people. Maybe your husband has never learned how to express himself or share, and you live a lonely existence. If you claim the help of a creative God who designed people with the ability to communicate, and creatively heighten your own sensitivity to your husband, you may be in for one of the biggest adventures of your life. Certainly your prayer life will develop; you'll feel the Holy Spirit controlling your responses; and you will be surprised by more than one miracle.
Never give in to a low quality of life within the home when God, the Redeemer, offers His help. One young wife telephoned to say, "Something has been happening to me. It is as if God told me that if I want things to change I am going to have to keep my mouth shut. So I've been trying, and do you know what I've discovered? When you know God you don't always have to be right!"
Another woman has grown beautiful praying for her family and creating an environment that works with her prayers. She prays, "Lord, help my husband not to be so short with Jimmy. He's so sensitive and he never gets a chance to finish what he wants to say. Help John to be more aware of this." And God does.
Making something new and creative out of family life can be a married woman's great adventure. It can also be the adventure of the single person, because the close interpersonal relationships within any living situation demand His help.
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One of my great adventures as a writer has come from the families who share with me how Honey for a Child's Heart2 has launched them into new adventures as families through sharing of books. Writing a book is an adventure of the riskiest sort. But after the pain and loneliness of the actual production, what joy and reward to see others learn to live creatively because I took the risk of adventure.
Setting up a reading program seems so simple an idea that one hardly thinks of it as creative. And yet books can take us on the finest kind of adventure without ever leaving the house. A good adventure takes discipline, and a well-ordered life is necessary for a reading program. Think of the potential for expanded horizons, for creative thinking, for learning something new!
I was talking about good reading to a group of mission candidates recently and one winsome young man told me later in conversation that he was a poor reader and hardly ever read a book. His story revealed unfortunate situations in first and second grade and a move to a new location in third grade where other students teased him about his inability to read. He developed a barrier against reading. He was bright and his mind retained what he heard, but he didn't like to read. It threatened his view of himself. I asked, "Have you ever asked God to help you overcome this handicap and work on it with divine help?" He thought about it for a minute and then said, "That would be a choice kind of adventure, wouldn't it?"
Both reading and learning to read fit the category of creative living. My friend may never be a speed reader, and what he sets out to do is easier said than done. But so is painting a picture or playing a musical instrument. It will take courage and sweat and perseverance.
One of my friends declares that learning to change the
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way you look is a phase of creative living. She says, "God gave you your face; He didn't give you your expression. Why not make it more pleasant?" For others it will be discipline of more sleep, better and less food, or a decision to stop chewing the fingernails.
Every meaningful adventure I have had has involved doing something I believed to be the will of God. I have been pushed out over my head in experiences so many times that I've found myself swimming strokes I didn't know I knew! Everything from a radio talk show to taking a chair-lift to the top of a mountain with the intent of skiing down! I was no pro in either event, but I did have some exciting surprises.
I've used the word swimming metaphorically, but it reminds me of a literal swim I once took. Gerry had just come to trust Christ. We were taking an exercise and swim class together at the Y. Following our first day of exercises, we jumped into the pool. She stood there for a minute and said, "I'm scared to death to put my face in the water, but now that I know God, I'll just say a little prayer and float across the pool on my face." She proceeded to do just that! Leaving me, who had known God for some time and who always swam with my head well above the water, standing agape. So I said a little prayer and similarly did a prone float across the pool!
The creativity of doing what you believe to be the will of God will more often have significant spiritual dimensions. It may be taking more time with your children, developing a new friendship, helping someone who is needy, or sharing your faith.
Taking seriously the fact that you have been entrusted with the gospel will bring you your most awesome adventures. Creatively sharing the Good News is a most expanding experience. Each person is unique: each hurts in a
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different place; the capacity for intake of truth varies. To take the great truths of God's redemption and communicate these skillfully takes creativity. We don't dump a load of truth; we interact. We need the right words, the illustrations that apply, the ability to listen — and God's help. No one can ever grow dull or small or uninteresting who grabs hold of this adventure. We have been entrusted with the truth about God!
Living creatively is as big as creation. Don't be among those who think that all birds are sparrows and that there are two kinds of trees": one with leaves and one with needles. Living creatively means noticing, being aware and alive to the world. It involves an appreciation and drive toward excellence. It involves things, people, ideas. God is noticing all the time. Shouldn't we be just a little more awake?
