God, Release Your Creativity!
VISION – Colour! What’s life without colour? It gives us surprise, depth, emotions. Red has a certain warmth to it, blue is cold. Yellow shouts. Green has sourness, and black is bitter.
Just take some time and have a look in your garden. Isn’t it striking how many shades of colour there are? Nature’s spectrum of colour is infinite!
The Bible emphasises God’s multi-coloured wisdom, which in turn raises the question why the Bible has been made into a black covered book. Why are our churches so grey?
Some people have made their belief into a black hole, sucking up all colours they come across, and all things that jump out of it are immediately trimmed down. For example if something is exceptional it’s classified as suspicious. Not because the Bible says so, but because grey is less noticeable, it’s safer unlike red, green or purple. One can easily hide in it.
Nevertheless I believe that God wants to sharpen up the way we are. He provided us with different accents, wanting to see us use them in order to reveal the potential beauty of our full blossom. He changed Abram into Abraham and Simon into Peter. As soon as God was given the opportunity to move in their lives, their identities dramatically increased in intensity.
We are made to make contact. Communication is of utmost importance, where creativity is a possibility.
Jesus said, ‘You don’t light up an oil-lamp to then stow away under a straw mat. No, you should place it on a stand so that it radiates out all its light into the surrounding area’. Creativity is such a stand as it enables us to shine out our light.
God wants to work through us. That is why Jesus continued with the following words, ‘Let your light similarly shine out to all people. Then they can see the good you do and praise God for it’.
It’s great news to know that as a creative person you are able to give away to others part of life’s joy, the pureness or also the care that you personally experience. By what you do, you pass on life, that is where is comes down to. If bearing fruit is giving on life to others, then life flows from creative people via creative expressions to the outside world.
A creative person often sees things from a slightly different perspective. He is independent in his judgement of situations and people. Such a person also has a focused eye to see with and is set up for observation. A creative person has extra aerials in order to be sensitive to fantasy and fantastic ideas. A creative person will sincerely defend his opinion, he is self-conscious and is sometimes irritatingly dominant. A creative person is playful: not everything has to have a use in his eyes. A creative person has a sense of humour and admires the humour in others. He is sensitive and enthusiastic. In short, a creative person has an original stance in life.
Jesus was such a person. He was spontaneous, independent and sometimes surprisingly different. He spoke to a storm. He heeled a blind man with saliva. He ate and drank with the scum of his time. He placed sinners, those weak in spirit and children in a special sort of daylight. He criticised those using foul language. He increased the festival ambiance by supplying extra wine or broke into tears by the mere site of the appalling condition the town was in. And take notice of the stories he told. Who would leave behind ninety-nine sheep to save a single lost sheep? Jesus clearly had great talent. He was also astonishingly intelligent, possessing character and dedication to give his talent quality. And he knew how to play.
Does everything have to have a use in life, or are we also allowed play around a bit as well? Our belief is a serious issue, so we treat it as a crucial matter. As if seriousness is an all-embracing virtue in our Christian lives. It isn’t. Actually, seriousness is very limited. With it you exclude a lot of things from life that God wants to give to us, such as the joy experienced through playful behaviour. The playful person experiences more of those things God wants to give to us than an earnest person. However, earnestness locks out the game but the game locks in earnestness. Therefore we can play the game by both experiencing joy and being serious.
God created the world in a playful frame of mind. In Proverbs 8 it says that the wisdom by which God formulated this world played like a child for God and took pleasure in its creation. We can recognise Jesus in this, who says that we should become like children in order to enter God’s kingdom. We see him eat, drink and celebrate. A creative but useless deed Maria performed by pouring perfume over his feet was not rejected. No, he places this deed in the spotlight, while he gives Judas’s earnest question the treatment it deserves. Wisdom and playful behaviour don’t exclude each other out. On the contrary, perhaps it’s wise to be able to play.
When Jesus says, ‘If The Son has liberated you, you will most likely be free’, by this he most certainly points out the freedom to express yourself in a creative manner. He also means the freedom to not flood yourself with it and be too competitive towards others, but rather to go into conversation with others. Creativity is most beautiful when it is a subservient process, in which our mutual understanding can grow. This is a process that God wants to renew daily, Paul says. Our creativity honours God.
That is why I have this prayer, ‘O God, creator of heaven and earth, release and place us in the space your spirit provides to be creative in, creative and free to bear fruit like your Son, Jesus Christ’. That I pray for everyone that reads this. And for myself as well, ‘Yes, release your creativity on me as well!’
Willem de Vink
