Sacred Creativity
What if even our best efforts are nothing more than good enough? What if the life we imagine is still far smaller than the creative life God invites us to? What if in all my busyness I miss the extraordinary moments offered to me?
These are the questions that ebb and flow through my mind in the quiet of a Sunday evening. That time when I breathe deeply the day coming to its close and contemplate the week that’s coming. A week that looks an awful lot like the ones that have come before.
Looking at life through weary eyes, through a mama’s eyes, through the eyes of one who only sees the here and now, can make life seem small and ordinary — insignificant. Living out our daily demands and obligations again and again and again can strip away the wonder and the miracle of a life lived in small but extraordinary moments.
Please don’t be fooled by these seemingly significant lies that your life is insignificant.
A life lived out in faith, even if it’s lived mainly in small moments, is still an extraordinary life. A life lived with creativity and hope is an incredibly significant life. A life lived in spirit and in truth is the something more so many people seek in the striving after and the building and chasing of dreams.
As one embracing a daily adventure in creativity, I choose to see life through a writer’s eyes (a writer still seeking the path for her and her words) even when I am tired or feel disappointed by what I didn’t do during the day.
I refuse to listen to the lies. Because I know too well when I’m tired or riddled with uncertainty about whether I’ve done anything at all that mattered, the lies are their loudest and much too easy to believe.
Instead, I choose to sit and reflect and listen to the whispers of truth that come in the lyric of a song or the hug of one of my girls or the smooth feel of my keyboard beneath my fingertips or the way the sun reflects off the clouds. Small moments. Extraordinary moments. Sacred moments.
If we seek truth, God is delighted to provide.
His truth reminds me tonight of just such extraordinary moments: creative journaling of ideas, reading truth that settled in my heart and mind (truth I know will play out in my writing and my daily living), rolling out homemade pizza dough and offering my 11-year-old pizza perfectly covered in pepperoni, praying over my girl to chase away her fear at bedtime, a mama robin feeding her babies in the nest in our carport.
These are the moments of a creative life.
Yes, I will edit a completed manuscript and I will show up to play with words. But a creative life, this adventure in creativity, is not only about writing or creating stories and characters. It isn’t only about the words on the page.
It is about a life lived with a bold vulnerability and openness. It is relationships and love and joy.
It is an ability to discover the extraordinary hiding in plain sight all around me. But I won’t see the sacred in my mundane unless I seek it, unless I believe it exists and am willing to slow down and see it. In the same way I need to see it in me, this sacred, extraordinary creativity that is my gift to nurture and use daily.
Today, and every day, I will choose to heed the invitation to come into the presence of the Creator and create something extraordinary, to move beyond good enough or settling, and instead living an amazing life in spirit and in truth.
