Oasis Talk--Right Brain
This was the talk that I gave last night at our Oasis Madrid service. After the talk, we had a bout 30 minutes of really fun worship time, where we did all sorts of new and interesting things to experience God in different ways (worship stations, Art table, stones of remembrance, some writing on mirrors, etc.)---Can I just say that I LOVE my church? It was so awesome to see everyone really engaging and praising God in creative ways. Anyway, here's the talk.....
For the past several months at our Oasis Services, we have been doing a series of talks called “body parts,” centering on this theme verse in Romans 6: “…offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness.” So each service we’ve looked at different parts of the body—heart, sex parts, hands, feet, arms, and last time we started on a 2-part set about the brain. Now the reason we split the brain up into two services is that the brain does so much, and does so many different things, that we couldn’t really fit it into one talk.
So last time, Troy spoke about “Left Brain.” He described the left brain as the more logical, intellectual, rational side of the brain, and the right brain as the more emotional, creative (his exact words were artsy fartsy), irrational side. My first instinct was to be offended at this, but then, no, when you think about it, it’s not offensive. Troy’s comments aside, we can all see who is and isn’t speaking when it’s time to talk about being in your RIGHT mind! As much as I joke about it, though, I really appreciate being part of a church that recognizes creativity and emotion as valid—that recognizes that people are different and think differently, and that we can interact with God in different ways. That not only can we think about God intellectually, but we can and should interact with Him creatively and emotionally as well.
I hope that what I just said was not a revelation to you, actually. I hope that you already knew that, and what I have to say tonight is just a reminder. I hope that if you’ve been around here for a while that you’ve experienced that truth as part of our community.
But just in case you need to hear it again, let me say it again: not only can we think about God intellectually, but we can and should interact with Him creatively and emotionally as well.
Often in the church, I think we see creativity as something extra. We can use it to make things look pretty or to make a sermon more interesting, but often we don’t really see it as an important part of our relationship with God. The easiest thing to do is to relegate creativity to a few people who are really into that stuff, and then they can share it with the rest. But I think that lets all of us off the hook, actually. I think that even if some of us are more logical, intellectual, rational people, we all have a creative, emotional side, and we all can use that part of ourselves to experience God in new ways.
Creativity is not an extra thing to add on if we have time. Creativity is built into us from the very beginning. In the story of creation in the book of Genesis, it says that God made humans in His image, in other words—he made us to look like Him, to reflect Him. The New Living Translation translates it as “God patterned them after himself…” The interesting thing is, at this point in the story all we have seen about God is that He is a creator. He is so infinitely creative that the Bible starts with that…..”In the beginning, God created…” and then goes on to name all of the wonderful things God made. Have you ever stopped to think about all the colors, all the animals, all the plants that are in the world? Have you ever thought about the amount of creativity it would require to come up with oceans and volcanoes and giraffes? The Psalmist, in Ps. 104, says this about creation: “What a wildly wonderful world, GOD! You made it all, with Wisdom at your side, made earth overflow with your wonderful creations.” And His creativity didn’t stop at the beginning. In the Old Testament, stories are told over and over of God’s creativity--of inventive and unorthodox plans that God comes up with to get his people, Israel, out of one scrape after another—for example: splitting a sea in half so they can walk through, feeding them by raining down food from heaven, defeating a city by having the army yell at walls, sending prophet after prophet to remind them through drama, speech, and poetry.
In the Gospels, God continues to show the creative extremes He will go to, all to reach and rescue His people, by becoming human—one of His own creation. The mystery of God was suddenly a person—someone we could see, hear, and touch. All-powerful God, becoming a weak human, so that He can rescue humans, so that in the end He’s glorified and worshipped even more. Jesus’ humanity was definitely an innovative approach to reconcile us to God! And then in the book of Acts, at the very beginning of the church, the Holy Spirit makes a dramatic entrance with fire and all sorts of languages, visions and dreams. Then God chooses to use Paul, a person who was determined to personally do his best to obliterate followers of Jesus from his culture, to be a missionary—traveling far and wide to spread the very thing he had tried to stop. The book of Revelation, the end of the story, is full of images so wildly different from anything we can imagine that after 2000 years we’re still trying to figure out what on earth it means!
Throughout the Bible, God shows us over and over that He is beyond our logic. He says this plainly through the prophet Isaiah when he says "My thoughts are completely different from yours," says the LORD. "And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.” (Is. 58:8) THIS is the God that made us in His image, the creator. When He patterned us after himself, part of that pattern is very, very creative.
We can say the same thing about our emotions—we are emotional beings because God is emotional. In the Old Testament, He shows every emotion from fierce anger to grief to delight to intense love. He compares Israel to his bride to show his depth of love. In the book of Hosea, he has the prophet demonstrate a love so crazy that he marries a prostitute, and over and over he goes back to buy her back when she runs away, because of His love. In Jesus’ life, we see him angry at the Pharisees and sometimes at his own disciples, we see him have compassion on the sick and the hungry, we see him grieve over Jerusalem, and we see Him cry and ask His father to please take away the responsibility of having to go through a horrible, public death. On the cross, he quotes the emotional psalms when he says—“my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God has emotions.
It would be enough to say that creativity and emotion are part of who we are because they are characteristics of God. But if you need more incentive, here it is! Creativity and emotion are part of our legacy as the people of God. Throughout history, God’s people have gone beyond the structured, normal formats of interacting with Him. After crossing the Red Sea and escaping Egypt, Moses and Miriam both sang, and the women danced and played their instruments in celebration. When they were building the tabernacle and the worship articles to go in it, God singled out two workers as being filled with His Spirit and set apart to do His work—because they were artists. In 1st Samuel, it says that when the Ark of the Covenant was brought back to the tabernacle, David danced, the priests sang, and the people shouted with joy. When King Jehosaphat cleaned out the idols and worship of other Gods from the nation, he and all the people bowed down in worship and then shouted their loyalty to God. After God’s people had been exiled and came back to rebuild the temple, the air was filled with the blend of some weeping for what was lost and some shouting for what was rebuilt. And the stories go on and on.
And then there are the psalms. The psalms are full of songs and poetry that express the full range of emotions to God in artistic form. Every emotion is brought to God with nothing held back. Take Psalm 22 and 23, for example. Psalm 23 is famous because it overflows with beautiful praise, peace, and assurance of God’s favor—
“the LORD is my shepherd; I have everything I need….”
“…even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil…”
“surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life…”
But the one right before it starts with this verse, equally familiar because Jesus used these same words when He was on the cross:
“my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why do you remain so distant?
Why do you ignore my cries for help?”
This is one of the most famous contrasts in the Psalms, but the book is full of them. Emotions vary from one extreme to the other, and, whether negative or positive, they are real and often raw. They often ask questions that we are afraid to voice out loud. They often express desires that are far from Godly—kind of like an emotional vomit (wipe them out, dash them against the rocks, pay them back, humiliate them…), or comments that seem kind of sarcastic and impolite to the creator of the universe, like this one from Psalm 30: “What will you gain if I die?....can my dust praise you from the grave?....”. Some are songs of praise for deliverance and are bursting with joy. The one thing that ties the emotional spectrum of the Psalms together is this: they are all brought straight to God. Here’s what I’m feeling, God. It may not be right, but this is what I’ve got, and I’m bringing it to you. These are the songs of the emotional, creative people of God.
I could keep talking about the early church, the music and art and architecture throughout the centuries that has pointed to God over and over and over, about poets and mystics who expressed their heart despite persecution even within the church, about new movements of prayer, mission, and creativity that are resurging around the world today, but since I only have 30 minutes to talk, I hope you get the idea. God’s people have a long history of being a creative, emotional people.
On one hand, while I was researching in the Old Testament and the Psalms, I was amazed and slightly overwhelmed at the sheer volume of creativity and emotion that comes screaming off the page when you’re looking for it. On the other hand, I became more and more restless and frustrated with myself the more I read. And to be honest, slightly envious of these people. What did they have that I don’t have? Why do I look I look at the ancient Hebrews--a people who lived before Bible colleges, before the printing press and widespread literacy gave everyone the ability to search the scriptures themselves, especially before the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, and His amazing gospel that the Kingdom of God is available here and now, before His death and resurrection that brought forgiveness so that we can follow Him, before so many things that we take for granted---why do I look at the way they experienced God and feel like there’s an intensity and an abandon there that I’m missing out on? Why does it feel like we’re somehow way behind in our pursuit of God? Shouldn’t I have more to celebrate, not less?
Phillip Yancey articulated the same amazement and frustration when writing about the Psalms in his book The Bible Jesus Read. He says,
I sense in them an urgency, a desire and hunger for God that makes my own look anemic by contrast. The psalmists panted for God with their tongues hanging out, as an exhausted deer pants for water. They lay awake at night dreaming of “the fair beauty of the Lord.” They would rather spend one day in God’s presence than a thousand years elsewhere.
It was the advanced school of faith these poets were enrolled in, and often I feel more like a kindergartner.
When I began to research for this talk, I already believed that this was important, but now, after looking at just how creative God is, and just how creative His people are, I’m more convinced than ever. This is not an extra. This is important. As humans made in the image of God, we have creativity and emotions. And as God’s people creativity and emotion are built into us through our history—they are part of who we are. Because creativity and emotions are a part of who we are, then they are included when we offer ourselves to God as instruments of righteousness. In reality, not only is God OK with creativity and with emotions, He means for us to use them for Him!
So what keeps us from bringing our creativity and our emotions to God? What’s stopping us from experiencing God with all of ourselves?
Sometimes I think it’s laziness—the usual habits and formats with God may not be the only way God has created us to interact with Him, but often it’s easier to keep with a habit than to think of how to do something differently. Maybe it’s laziness because I know that God wants more than my intellect, but being creative and expressing emotions is a lot of work. And maybe it’s laziness because I know that in a community setting, if we all start being real then ugliness might come out, and there will be a mess to clean up. And if we all start being creative, there will probably be some messes to clean up there too.
If it’s laziness, then here’s my challenge: do it anyway. Yes, it’s new and different and might require effort, but it’s worth it. Yes, it gets messy in a community—all you have to do is read the story of God’s people throughout time or the Psalms that I just mentioned to see that, but it’s worth the mess.
Or maybe it’s fear. Maybe I’m afraid that I’ll try to be creative and it won’t be any good. Maybe I’m afraid I’ll fall flat on my face if I try to dance, or that my painting will look more like scribbles, or that my poetry will, well……suck. Maybe I’m afraid that if I express my emotions to God, what I really feel, whether it’s through words or movement or tears or visual arts, He’ll be surprised at what raw emotions, many of them ugly, I hold inside of me. Maybe He’ll be disgusted that I can’t get a hold of myself and I cry too much or that I might act immature and shout and dance my happiness instead of a quiet “thank you.”
If it’s fear that stops us, then I’ll say this—that’s what grace is for. Troy loves to say that grace means that there’s nothing we can do to make God love us any more or any less. So what if we screw up? So what if we fall when we dance, or if our poetry sucks? So what if we look like idiots when we cry? There is nothing we can do to make Him love us any more or any less. Some or all of these things are going to happen, and God already knows it. When we were created with creativity and emotions, God knew from the beginning that we wouldn’t always get it right, and He still loves us. We might be afraid, but He’s not. We can dance and dream and paint and write and cry to God.
I’m so thankful for that. I’m so glad that I can be myself with God. Literally for years, I tried experiencing God only through a very structured means, with long prayer lists divided by each day of the week, memorization charts, Bible reading charts, fasting charts, and journal space with bullet points for each thing I learned from scripture each day. And after a while, about 10 months after I moved to Spain, I finally acknowledged that I thought maybe I just couldn’t cut it as a Christian. I was thirsty to really experience God, and it just wasn’t happening. Thank God for a church that loved me as I was and encouraged my creativity at that time. Thank God for friends that I could talk to, and great books, and time to think and sort out what was the problem. And I began realizing something I thought I had known all along—God made me. He meant to make me, He knew how I would turn out, and He did it on purpose. He meant for me to be who I am. I remember how liberating it was for me to come to know—not just know the fact in my head, but really know, that I can be creative in my pursuit of God. That I can draw or sing a prayer, that I can spend time enjoying His creation--that I can bring my wildly varying emotions to Him in a way that really expresses what I feel.
This is an issue that’s really close to my heart, and that I can feel myself becoming more and more passionate about it as time goes on. I know we should be creative. I want to be a part of a community that creates and interacts with God in different ways together, and I really feel like helping this to happen is one of the reasons that I’m here in Madrid. So I want to share a bit of “my dream” with you. My dream is for us to really be creative. For us to be real about our emotions and bring them to God. In my mind I want to see dancers dancing their prayers to God, walls covered and notebooks filled with poetry and prose and painting, sculptors and actors making physical representations of their worship, people going outdoors and celebrating beauty in God’s creation. I want people to be drawn to Oasis Madrid because of an intense reality with each other and with God. I want to see the strategic thinkers and the planners and the “new idea” people working together and using the abilities God has given them to make a difference in the community around us. I want to see creative expressions grow up from within the church here in Madrid.
I guess to sum it all up, I want us to know—to really know, that we can be who we are in our interaction with God. I want us to be who we were made to be. He made us. He meant to. It wasn’t an accident. He gave us our intellect and our logic, AND He gave us our creativity and our emotions. We are people made in the image of a creative God, we are part of a history of people who are creative, and we bring our creativity and our emotions to God as instruments of righteousness.
For the past several months at our Oasis Services, we have been doing a series of talks called “body parts,” centering on this theme verse in Romans 6: “…offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness.” So each service we’ve looked at different parts of the body—heart, sex parts, hands, feet, arms, and last time we started on a 2-part set about the brain. Now the reason we split the brain up into two services is that the brain does so much, and does so many different things, that we couldn’t really fit it into one talk.
So last time, Troy spoke about “Left Brain.” He described the left brain as the more logical, intellectual, rational side of the brain, and the right brain as the more emotional, creative (his exact words were artsy fartsy), irrational side. My first instinct was to be offended at this, but then, no, when you think about it, it’s not offensive. Troy’s comments aside, we can all see who is and isn’t speaking when it’s time to talk about being in your RIGHT mind! As much as I joke about it, though, I really appreciate being part of a church that recognizes creativity and emotion as valid—that recognizes that people are different and think differently, and that we can interact with God in different ways. That not only can we think about God intellectually, but we can and should interact with Him creatively and emotionally as well.
I hope that what I just said was not a revelation to you, actually. I hope that you already knew that, and what I have to say tonight is just a reminder. I hope that if you’ve been around here for a while that you’ve experienced that truth as part of our community.
But just in case you need to hear it again, let me say it again: not only can we think about God intellectually, but we can and should interact with Him creatively and emotionally as well.
Often in the church, I think we see creativity as something extra. We can use it to make things look pretty or to make a sermon more interesting, but often we don’t really see it as an important part of our relationship with God. The easiest thing to do is to relegate creativity to a few people who are really into that stuff, and then they can share it with the rest. But I think that lets all of us off the hook, actually. I think that even if some of us are more logical, intellectual, rational people, we all have a creative, emotional side, and we all can use that part of ourselves to experience God in new ways.
Creativity is not an extra thing to add on if we have time. Creativity is built into us from the very beginning. In the story of creation in the book of Genesis, it says that God made humans in His image, in other words—he made us to look like Him, to reflect Him. The New Living Translation translates it as “God patterned them after himself…” The interesting thing is, at this point in the story all we have seen about God is that He is a creator. He is so infinitely creative that the Bible starts with that…..”In the beginning, God created…” and then goes on to name all of the wonderful things God made. Have you ever stopped to think about all the colors, all the animals, all the plants that are in the world? Have you ever thought about the amount of creativity it would require to come up with oceans and volcanoes and giraffes? The Psalmist, in Ps. 104, says this about creation: “What a wildly wonderful world, GOD! You made it all, with Wisdom at your side, made earth overflow with your wonderful creations.” And His creativity didn’t stop at the beginning. In the Old Testament, stories are told over and over of God’s creativity--of inventive and unorthodox plans that God comes up with to get his people, Israel, out of one scrape after another—for example: splitting a sea in half so they can walk through, feeding them by raining down food from heaven, defeating a city by having the army yell at walls, sending prophet after prophet to remind them through drama, speech, and poetry.
In the Gospels, God continues to show the creative extremes He will go to, all to reach and rescue His people, by becoming human—one of His own creation. The mystery of God was suddenly a person—someone we could see, hear, and touch. All-powerful God, becoming a weak human, so that He can rescue humans, so that in the end He’s glorified and worshipped even more. Jesus’ humanity was definitely an innovative approach to reconcile us to God! And then in the book of Acts, at the very beginning of the church, the Holy Spirit makes a dramatic entrance with fire and all sorts of languages, visions and dreams. Then God chooses to use Paul, a person who was determined to personally do his best to obliterate followers of Jesus from his culture, to be a missionary—traveling far and wide to spread the very thing he had tried to stop. The book of Revelation, the end of the story, is full of images so wildly different from anything we can imagine that after 2000 years we’re still trying to figure out what on earth it means!
Throughout the Bible, God shows us over and over that He is beyond our logic. He says this plainly through the prophet Isaiah when he says "My thoughts are completely different from yours," says the LORD. "And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.” (Is. 58:8) THIS is the God that made us in His image, the creator. When He patterned us after himself, part of that pattern is very, very creative.
We can say the same thing about our emotions—we are emotional beings because God is emotional. In the Old Testament, He shows every emotion from fierce anger to grief to delight to intense love. He compares Israel to his bride to show his depth of love. In the book of Hosea, he has the prophet demonstrate a love so crazy that he marries a prostitute, and over and over he goes back to buy her back when she runs away, because of His love. In Jesus’ life, we see him angry at the Pharisees and sometimes at his own disciples, we see him have compassion on the sick and the hungry, we see him grieve over Jerusalem, and we see Him cry and ask His father to please take away the responsibility of having to go through a horrible, public death. On the cross, he quotes the emotional psalms when he says—“my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God has emotions.
It would be enough to say that creativity and emotion are part of who we are because they are characteristics of God. But if you need more incentive, here it is! Creativity and emotion are part of our legacy as the people of God. Throughout history, God’s people have gone beyond the structured, normal formats of interacting with Him. After crossing the Red Sea and escaping Egypt, Moses and Miriam both sang, and the women danced and played their instruments in celebration. When they were building the tabernacle and the worship articles to go in it, God singled out two workers as being filled with His Spirit and set apart to do His work—because they were artists. In 1st Samuel, it says that when the Ark of the Covenant was brought back to the tabernacle, David danced, the priests sang, and the people shouted with joy. When King Jehosaphat cleaned out the idols and worship of other Gods from the nation, he and all the people bowed down in worship and then shouted their loyalty to God. After God’s people had been exiled and came back to rebuild the temple, the air was filled with the blend of some weeping for what was lost and some shouting for what was rebuilt. And the stories go on and on.
And then there are the psalms. The psalms are full of songs and poetry that express the full range of emotions to God in artistic form. Every emotion is brought to God with nothing held back. Take Psalm 22 and 23, for example. Psalm 23 is famous because it overflows with beautiful praise, peace, and assurance of God’s favor—
“the LORD is my shepherd; I have everything I need….”
“…even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil…”
“surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life…”
But the one right before it starts with this verse, equally familiar because Jesus used these same words when He was on the cross:
“my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why do you remain so distant?
Why do you ignore my cries for help?”
This is one of the most famous contrasts in the Psalms, but the book is full of them. Emotions vary from one extreme to the other, and, whether negative or positive, they are real and often raw. They often ask questions that we are afraid to voice out loud. They often express desires that are far from Godly—kind of like an emotional vomit (wipe them out, dash them against the rocks, pay them back, humiliate them…), or comments that seem kind of sarcastic and impolite to the creator of the universe, like this one from Psalm 30: “What will you gain if I die?....can my dust praise you from the grave?....”. Some are songs of praise for deliverance and are bursting with joy. The one thing that ties the emotional spectrum of the Psalms together is this: they are all brought straight to God. Here’s what I’m feeling, God. It may not be right, but this is what I’ve got, and I’m bringing it to you. These are the songs of the emotional, creative people of God.
I could keep talking about the early church, the music and art and architecture throughout the centuries that has pointed to God over and over and over, about poets and mystics who expressed their heart despite persecution even within the church, about new movements of prayer, mission, and creativity that are resurging around the world today, but since I only have 30 minutes to talk, I hope you get the idea. God’s people have a long history of being a creative, emotional people.
On one hand, while I was researching in the Old Testament and the Psalms, I was amazed and slightly overwhelmed at the sheer volume of creativity and emotion that comes screaming off the page when you’re looking for it. On the other hand, I became more and more restless and frustrated with myself the more I read. And to be honest, slightly envious of these people. What did they have that I don’t have? Why do I look I look at the ancient Hebrews--a people who lived before Bible colleges, before the printing press and widespread literacy gave everyone the ability to search the scriptures themselves, especially before the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, and His amazing gospel that the Kingdom of God is available here and now, before His death and resurrection that brought forgiveness so that we can follow Him, before so many things that we take for granted---why do I look at the way they experienced God and feel like there’s an intensity and an abandon there that I’m missing out on? Why does it feel like we’re somehow way behind in our pursuit of God? Shouldn’t I have more to celebrate, not less?
Phillip Yancey articulated the same amazement and frustration when writing about the Psalms in his book The Bible Jesus Read. He says,
I sense in them an urgency, a desire and hunger for God that makes my own look anemic by contrast. The psalmists panted for God with their tongues hanging out, as an exhausted deer pants for water. They lay awake at night dreaming of “the fair beauty of the Lord.” They would rather spend one day in God’s presence than a thousand years elsewhere.
It was the advanced school of faith these poets were enrolled in, and often I feel more like a kindergartner.
When I began to research for this talk, I already believed that this was important, but now, after looking at just how creative God is, and just how creative His people are, I’m more convinced than ever. This is not an extra. This is important. As humans made in the image of God, we have creativity and emotions. And as God’s people creativity and emotion are built into us through our history—they are part of who we are. Because creativity and emotions are a part of who we are, then they are included when we offer ourselves to God as instruments of righteousness. In reality, not only is God OK with creativity and with emotions, He means for us to use them for Him!
So what keeps us from bringing our creativity and our emotions to God? What’s stopping us from experiencing God with all of ourselves?
Sometimes I think it’s laziness—the usual habits and formats with God may not be the only way God has created us to interact with Him, but often it’s easier to keep with a habit than to think of how to do something differently. Maybe it’s laziness because I know that God wants more than my intellect, but being creative and expressing emotions is a lot of work. And maybe it’s laziness because I know that in a community setting, if we all start being real then ugliness might come out, and there will be a mess to clean up. And if we all start being creative, there will probably be some messes to clean up there too.
If it’s laziness, then here’s my challenge: do it anyway. Yes, it’s new and different and might require effort, but it’s worth it. Yes, it gets messy in a community—all you have to do is read the story of God’s people throughout time or the Psalms that I just mentioned to see that, but it’s worth the mess.
Or maybe it’s fear. Maybe I’m afraid that I’ll try to be creative and it won’t be any good. Maybe I’m afraid I’ll fall flat on my face if I try to dance, or that my painting will look more like scribbles, or that my poetry will, well……suck. Maybe I’m afraid that if I express my emotions to God, what I really feel, whether it’s through words or movement or tears or visual arts, He’ll be surprised at what raw emotions, many of them ugly, I hold inside of me. Maybe He’ll be disgusted that I can’t get a hold of myself and I cry too much or that I might act immature and shout and dance my happiness instead of a quiet “thank you.”
If it’s fear that stops us, then I’ll say this—that’s what grace is for. Troy loves to say that grace means that there’s nothing we can do to make God love us any more or any less. So what if we screw up? So what if we fall when we dance, or if our poetry sucks? So what if we look like idiots when we cry? There is nothing we can do to make Him love us any more or any less. Some or all of these things are going to happen, and God already knows it. When we were created with creativity and emotions, God knew from the beginning that we wouldn’t always get it right, and He still loves us. We might be afraid, but He’s not. We can dance and dream and paint and write and cry to God.
I’m so thankful for that. I’m so glad that I can be myself with God. Literally for years, I tried experiencing God only through a very structured means, with long prayer lists divided by each day of the week, memorization charts, Bible reading charts, fasting charts, and journal space with bullet points for each thing I learned from scripture each day. And after a while, about 10 months after I moved to Spain, I finally acknowledged that I thought maybe I just couldn’t cut it as a Christian. I was thirsty to really experience God, and it just wasn’t happening. Thank God for a church that loved me as I was and encouraged my creativity at that time. Thank God for friends that I could talk to, and great books, and time to think and sort out what was the problem. And I began realizing something I thought I had known all along—God made me. He meant to make me, He knew how I would turn out, and He did it on purpose. He meant for me to be who I am. I remember how liberating it was for me to come to know—not just know the fact in my head, but really know, that I can be creative in my pursuit of God. That I can draw or sing a prayer, that I can spend time enjoying His creation--that I can bring my wildly varying emotions to Him in a way that really expresses what I feel.
This is an issue that’s really close to my heart, and that I can feel myself becoming more and more passionate about it as time goes on. I know we should be creative. I want to be a part of a community that creates and interacts with God in different ways together, and I really feel like helping this to happen is one of the reasons that I’m here in Madrid. So I want to share a bit of “my dream” with you. My dream is for us to really be creative. For us to be real about our emotions and bring them to God. In my mind I want to see dancers dancing their prayers to God, walls covered and notebooks filled with poetry and prose and painting, sculptors and actors making physical representations of their worship, people going outdoors and celebrating beauty in God’s creation. I want people to be drawn to Oasis Madrid because of an intense reality with each other and with God. I want to see the strategic thinkers and the planners and the “new idea” people working together and using the abilities God has given them to make a difference in the community around us. I want to see creative expressions grow up from within the church here in Madrid.
I guess to sum it all up, I want us to know—to really know, that we can be who we are in our interaction with God. I want us to be who we were made to be. He made us. He meant to. It wasn’t an accident. He gave us our intellect and our logic, AND He gave us our creativity and our emotions. We are people made in the image of a creative God, we are part of a history of people who are creative, and we bring our creativity and our emotions to God as instruments of righteousness.
posted by kelly_w at 9:15 PM
1 Comments:
Hi , Just read your blog on creativity and God!
Felt so good when I finished it !
:-)
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