The NBC Team is exploring one of our core missional words – creativity.  We discuss how quickly people claim they are not creative. Yet creativity is imparted to every person from God. We are creative because we are created in the image of the Creator.  A more accurate assessment should be, “I have silenced, stifled, or disregarded” my creativity.

How often this happens! Children have a natural creative energy moving and stirring within them, ready to see the world from a sense of wonder, awe, and joy. Children imagine the cardboard box is a castle, their stuffed animals are friends, a stick in the road is a magic wand, or the space under a table a fortified hideaway.

Why is silencing our creativity so detrimental? My dad would say the danger is the loss of imagination. Without imagination we cannot picture what could be. Part of the work Dad did with Mom in their home before any children were born was to imagine the type of loving and Godly home they would like to have. Dad would imagine what his parenting relationship with us could be before we were even born.

Part of the genius of my dad’s creativity is that he imagined a space for co-creativity, a space where his imagination of the future was not to demand a specific idealized vision, but he used his imagination to envision the creative space needed for co-creation.  I believe this is what we can get wrong as parents or leaders. I use my creative imagination to lock in this idealized setting. All the kids learning Spanish, studying music and Shakespeare, looking up to me in rapture as I read a short story, memorizing scripture together. 

This vision doesn’t match my daughters’ creative vision and thus the creative dreams collide. Dad, on the contrary, shattered this typical struggle by eliminating the temptation to concretize all the imagined creative achievements he wanted for my brother Jay and me.

Instead, he imagined how to create conversations, spaces, opportunities for creativity to flourish in my mind and heart. He didn’t impose his creative will on my life. He offered creative freedom. He invited deep listening for what God is asking for my life, not demanding what he wanted for me.

What a good father and a wonderful nod toward the creativity God invites us to live and work within. How can I create space, time, and joy to listen to the creativity God is inviting and calling me to, and that this calling would fulfill His work for me in the world?

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. – Ephesians 2:10