It is both exciting and frustrating to have a creative idea for a story only to discover someone else already wrote the key part in a previously published work. “There is nothing new under the sun” (Ecc. 1:9-10). Technically speaking, human beings are not creative. We are constructive. What we call creativity is a manifestation of the divine image in which we were made. We like to create and name and speak life into, just like our Maker. But all of our creating is really only reassembling. We are working with existing parts. No one has ever invented a new color. Now one has ever drawn a never before seen shape. And no one has ever told a truly unique story. We use words like creative, unique, and one of a kind, but this is accomodative flattery. God made every line, circle, color, archetype, and theme with which we construct our works of art.
God is creative. He spoke the universe into existence ex nihilo, out of nothing (Heb. 11:3). His Word made light and sky, land and trees, birds and fish, mammoths and men. He called the stars by name, and suddenly they appeared where there had only been darkness before (Psa. 147:4). Those stars sang and the angels shouted for joy as Yahweh laid the foundations of a world that did not exist until then (Job 38:7). Did you know the stars sang at creation? Maybe you thought stars were simply balls of burning gas in outer space, but “even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of” (who knows the reference?). God made the choir first and flung it into the heavens so that there would be songs of joyful praise as he shaped the worlds with his voice. God’s Word became fire and ferrum, formations of rock and fungi, flora and fauna, and finally the flesh of Man. He made dirt, and then he made a shape from that dirt and breathed air into it, and gave his creation a name: Adam, mankind.
You and I are animated mudpies imitating our Maker by pretending to make things that have never been seen before. But you have never even once been creative in your entire life, and neither have I. Give up every shape, color, and concept you ever encountered in this world. Promise not to use words, gestures, or thought since he gave you all of those too. Surrender your body, brain, and the air your breath. Then, in the nothingness that is left, create. You can’t, and neither can I. We live in God’s world. We work with God’s materials. We are God’s creation. And we live, move, and play according to the rules he established. We can only do what we do because God did what he did, and because what God made and did works.
We must enlarge our vision of the world in which we live, a world made out of words. We are characters in a story which the Master Author is speaking, figures stitched into a massive tapestry acting out great trials and great deeds, cast members in a grand drama never realizing we are reading off a script, children playing at the feet of our Father in joyful ignorance that it is he who gave us life, built our house, gave us our toys, and delights to observe us as we grow. “This is my Father’s world,” and we should never forget it. It’s easy to do so, to be distracted by busyness and by the importance, so-called, of our work, work that makes the crayon scrawling of a two-year seem like real art. We thought what we produced was so much more important. But each of us is that child: scribbling on paper with the crayons our Father gave us, and experiencing his delight in what we are so proud of creating. --JME
