Average is always a safe choice, and it is the most dangerous choice you can make.
Frankly, the people who whine the most about how hard their lives are have very rarely experienced much to be disappointed about. They seem to find solace in their most negative memories, using these as a blank check that abdicates them from all personal responsibility. “I am how I am because of the pain of my past. If you had experienced what I have experienced, you would understand my bitterness, my anger, my paralysis, my despair.
Jesus’s early followers formed a movement of dreamers and visionaries.
The life of faith is less about gathering information than it is about expanding imagination. The movement Jesus started was a movement of dreamers and visionaries, not a movement of academics and theologians.
When we are freed from the rules and regulations that are so often imposed on us in the name of God, we discover that creativity is the natural result of spirituality. And if this is true, then our soul is the primary material for all artistic expression.
It’s hard to tell a great story if we remain stuck in chapter one.
It takes courage to not only accept our limitations but embrace our potential. To deny our creative nature is to choose a life where we are less and thus responsible for less. We see ourselves as created beings, so we choose to survive. When we see ourselves as creative beings, we must instead create.
I have come to realize, after over thirty years of studying human creativity, that the great divide is not between those who are artists and those who are not, but between those who understand that they are creative and those who have become convinced that they are not.
Unfortunately, the people who have the greatest influence in our lives rarely understand the power of their words to shape who we become. They never fully understand that what informs us forms us. Words spoken into a soul are like the hands of a potter pressed against wet clay.
While we may never find or receive the love from others that our hearts are desperate for, we can receive a love even greater than that of which we were deprived.
It’s odd how we prioritize the things the things that matter to us. We choose a career or job; we choose a city or place to live. We make so many things important to us, but in all the things we factor in as we craft our futures, we make the people in our lives a commodity of, at best, secondary importance. We would take a job and give up our people rather than choose a tribe and give up the job.
Who do we become when we stop allowing all the voices in our head to crowd out the one voice we must hear to come to life?
The tragedy of a life that is never fully lived is not simply the loss of that one life. The tragedy is the endless number of lives that would have been forever changed if we had chosen to live differently.
Our lives will become our greatest works of art not only when our relationships are a beautiful expression of love, acceptance, and intimacy, but when we have a deep sense of purpose that produces accomplishments that express, for us, success and significance.
The great tragedy that I have witnessed over and over again is that we keep underestimating how much God wants to do in us and through us. Too many of us have believed the lies we have been told: that we’re not good enough, we’re not smart enough, we’re not talented enough, we’re just not enough. One of the facets of God that makes him extraordinary is his ability to do the impossible through ordinary, everyday, common people like you and me.
Creativity should be an everyday experience. Creativity should be as common as breathing. We breathe, therefore we create.
Since part of our creative responsibility is to move from imagination to image, we need to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and allow our imagination once again to be the playground of God. And once our dreams and visions are the material that has been passed on to us by a divine imagination, then it is time to dream, to risk, and to create.
We are most human when love is our motive.
Life is a series of challenges, adventures, and yes, even battles. There will always be giants to subdue and dragons to slay. I have already decided to die with my sword in hand. There is more courage in us than danger ahead of us. You are strong enough for the battles ahead.
If we are inherently spiritual creatures, we are by our nature creative beings, yet we live in the fear that if we aspire to be more we will discover ourselves to be less.