Embrace Authentic Beauty When We Are Creative

What on earth was I doing there, I wondered. There I sat at a writer’s conference in Nashville, Tennessee. Far from home and wondering what I had gotten myself into.  Me, a therapist and introvert, had somehow found her way into a room full of strangers where I was being invited to stand up and tell everyone about my writing idea. A room full of writers. Simply terrifying.

It was all a part of this effort I was trying to actually live like God was active in my life. To not only believe cognitively but to also notice the life of my heart. The place where I had desires, passions, and where God so often speaks and leads and nudges.  I was learning subtly and slowly that I needed creativity. Because creativity is the language of the heart. Creative acts of music and art and poetry, those are places where we express our deepest human struggles, longings, and joys. So often language alone doesn’t tell the whole story of the human heart. Rather, song and dance and color are the best expressions of the complexity and layers of the human experience.

I was steadily recognizing the importance of creativity and, so, I had set out to re-capture it.

It’s not as though I ever tried to lose touch with my creativity. I grew up writing, singing, creating plays and musicals with my sisters, and making up games.  Somehow, as I grew up and homework turned to working, adult life became engulfed with responsibilities of bills, schedules, and all kinds of other grown-up type responsibilities. Gradually, I lost touch with the creativity I practiced so naturally growing up. I didn’t have time to write. I no longer sang while my sister played the piano. And who had time to try to voice their deep hopes or struggles in a poem or song when there was laundry to do or I could schedule another meeting or client?

I simply didn’t have time for creativity. It wasn’t practical.

I didn’t have time for it until I realize that I needed it that is.

I needed it because of how it caused me to experience authentic beauty and the life of God. Without it, the mundaneness and rituals of everyday life so easily lulled me into forgetting that life is a miracle and that undiluted beauty is present with me and all around me all the time. Beauty itself is at hand.

I needed it because I was increasingly realizing how the world of creativity somehow converged with the life of God. I hadn’t thought about that before. I was noticing how creativity helped us do this mysterious thing as humans, how it seemed to help us tune into and even join in the currents of beauty in the world. Creativity somehow seemed to allow us to enter into that life-giving current. I was realizing that if I wanted to know more about God and more of authentic beauty, creativity seemed to be part of the package.

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. If we are made in the image of God, then we have been made in the image of the original Creator. The author of life. The mind behind the Milky Way, the heart behind infants and the hope of Springtime. We are created in the image of that God. And, so, when we are creative, we are essentially taking up and living into our true identity, who we are and what we have been created for. To make new things alongside and in union with the Creator himself.

And, so, while I was nervous and feeling entirely awkward, in that room in Nashville, something really significant was happening. I was in some official and tangible way reclaiming part of my true identity. Allison Fallon was teaching me that creativity was real, it was powerful, and it was entirely worth my time. And that was life changing.

Truth be told, I think we are innately creative regardless of whether or not we try. That is simply who we are. However, when we give our creativity space and recognize that it has a life of its own, I think we can experience and harness the beauty of creativity in a new way, even the beauty of life in a way. We can experience partnering with and experiencing God in a new way.

So, what is it for you? What invitation to creativity awaits you today? Is it baking cookies or building a fort with your kids? Is it taking your writing or your painting more seriously by offering it more space to flourish and come alive? Is it creating space for relationships and hospitality?

I don’t know what it is for you. But I guarantee that you are a creative being, filled with the sacred life of God. And I guarantee that you are invited to coming alongside him in making all things new and all things beautiful.

In a world, filled with laundry and meetings and to do lists, may we recognize the life of beauty in our midst. And may we join it in bringing new and beautiful things to life.