This post is part of the Poured Forth Blog Post Series: 1 [2] 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Poured Forth is also available as a book: Poured Forth
The creative spark is both a blessing and a burden.
The blessing flashes on us like a lightning bolt. We wake up from a dream with a melody in our head. We see the perfect angle for the sunlight, the perfect combination of colors, the perspective and scene all wrapped together into a unified vision. A turn of phrase hits us, and it quickly grows into a poem or lyric for a song. Or perhaps the Lord sparks into vibrant life some latent connections amongst scripture passages, and we realize we have never read or heard a published insight into God’s Word quite like this one.
And so we jump out of bed in the dark or pull the car over or run into our study or go to the piano or pick up our guitar, and the ideas pour out. It’s an exhilaration like no other. We become, for those brief moments, a pure channel for beauty, wisdom, and insight flowing into this world. It is of us, and we shape it, and yet somehow it is also not of us. And at the best of times, it feels as if we are nothing more than observers of a river flowing through us—yet somehow past us—and onto the page before us, like putting our fingers into a waterfall and watching it change as it flows ever on its course. We may shape it, but we cannot stop it.
The Narnia scholar Michael Ward, in Chapter 3 of his book The Narnia Code,1 describes how he had a sudden “eureka moment” while reading Lewis’s poem “The Planets.” He jumped up and began to grab books off his shelves, making discoveries that would challenge and change the entire world of Lewis scholarship. In a single evening, Ward suddenly envisioned a dramatic new approach to reading Lewis that would become his dissertation and the basis of his books Planet Narnia and The Narnia Code.
This lightning bolt of creative insight seems to be a common coin among creatives and academics. Composer Igor Stravinsky wrote his Octet for wind instruments after dreaming about which instruments to include. Rich Mullins famously wrote “Our God is an Awesome God” in his head while driving to a conference. I could cite many more examples, but if you are a creative or a scholar or a pastor, you do not need them. You know this is true because you’ve lived it yourself.
And yet, sadly, the lightning fades. The storm blows past. The sunset’s crimson flame grows grey. And we are left with the burden and the questions. We look over what we typed or wrote or painted or composed or researched or photographed, and a crushing doubt settles over us. What began as an avalanche of joy and a waterfall of insight sooner or later transforms into mountains of uncertainty and a burden we can never quite release.
Maybe we read our poem to a dear friend, and they give us only a blank stare in return. Or perhaps we read a bit of our article or dissertation idea to a colleague, and they tell us it sounds like something a famous scholar published already. “That song sounds like so-and-so,” we hear when we play our new worship song for the keyboardist at church.
The questions bombard us relentlessly: Is this worth anything? Will anyone care? Why am I wasting my time with this? When will I finish it? Can I finish it? Should I? What will I do with it when I’m done? Why should I work on this when I should be doing more “productive” things? And what about my other ideas that I still haven’t finished? How can I start a new painting or book or song when I can’t even finish the last one? Is my work really any good? Am I really any good? Or am I just fooling myself and pretending? Will my work change the world, or am I just another deluded nobody?
Then we recall our calling to proclaim God’s good news and glory with our work, and a whole new level of questioning begins: Is this idea a gift from God, or did I just make it up? Is this true to the Lord’s character? Is it true to the Bible? Will God want it? Will He bless it? How can I justify spending time on my own creative or academic work when God needs people to do such-and-so? And how do I know which project or song or poem or painting or article or textbook or sermon God really wants me to work on?
We feel guilty when we work on our creative ideas because we should be doing day-to-day things that “need” to get done. Yet we also feel guilty when we do the day-to-day things that “need” to get done because we are taking God’s giftings for granted and not stewarding them well. We long to share our work with others because we desperately hope it will bless them. Yet we shrink from sharing because we are sure they won’t understand it or care about it the way we do. We crave recognition and applause. Yet we feel guilty if anyone ever gives us any because we know God wants us to be humble.
And so it continues for years, the cycle of blessing and burden, of lightning and languor, of praise and put-downs, of guilt over time spent creating and guilt over time spent not creating, of broadcasting our work and burying it. All of us who create new things live suspended amongst all these states of being, like a quantum superposition. We learn to work through it or pray through it or ignore it—for a while.
Eventually, many of us give up and decide it is easier not to struggle with it anymore. We put away our poetry books and sketchbooks and guitars and dreams about sharing new insights from the Bible, and we settle into a comfortable life like “normal” people. We have no more guilt about not finishing things, and we have no more guilt about pursuing the activities and obligations of “normal” life. All those poems or paintings or photographs or book drafts or songs are safely tucked away in a drawer or filing cabinet or on a backup hard drive, and our hearts are safely tucked away from the pain and raw vulnerability of it all. Nobody knows we are creative, and nobody needs to know. We are safe.
And heaven weeps.
This post is part of the Poured Forth Blog Post Series: 1 [2] 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Poured Forth is also available as a book: Poured Forth
Footnotes:
- Michael Ward, The Narnia Code (Tyndale House, 2010), 27–29. ↩︎
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