10 ways for Christians to embrace our creative power
Being born is a holy calling to join God in free, joyful, and playful expression.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). The very first picture of God we see catches God in the act of creating. What if the continual expansion of the universe and our willing and resistant evolving in it are proof that God did not stop creating after Genesis 1 and 2? What if God was just getting started? What if God is always just getting started?
With all due respect for prayer and study, the best way to get a real feel for God’s essence is to watch a child at deep play. Such freedom! Such joy! Creativity is what happens when freedom and joy come together. It is the overflow of freedom and joy. When Jesus says, “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it” (Mark 10:15), he is signaling and suggesting that somehow God, childlikeness, and the domain of free, joyous expression go together—that such realities share a certain commonality that makes life happen in its freshest, finest, and fullest way, over and over again.
Being born as children is a holy calling to join God in free, joyful, and playful creative expression. It is easy to forget this calling in the throes of a vast assortment of dehumanizing and diminishing realities that seek to snuff the Spirit right out of us from the day we are born. That is why we must, in the words of Jesus, be “born again” (John 3:3). To be born again is not, first and foremost, to have our souls saved for residence in heaven in the next life but to have our souls reclaimed for dynamic creative experience and expression with God and one another in this life.
