a nebula left after a stellar explosion.

 

God is the ultimate "creative," the source of every color and shape and texture. He sees everything. He's sensitive to the slightest nuance of hue and opacity. He loves balance and contrast and symmetry, and He loves their counterparts, imbalance and similarity and assymetry. He knows how to use them all perfectly to create the beautiful, the awe-inspiring, the terrifying, the inexplicable, the revelatory. 

God is the original artist. He is painter, sculptor, writer, singer, performer, communicator, director, producer. 

It makes sense then that He wants us to be artists too, doesn't it? I was talking with someone about this the other day. We were talking about how the world is not necessirly divided into people who are creative as part of their jobs and people whose jobs do not require creativity. There are businessmen who are "artists" in the way they do business. They aren't satisfied with simply following the old methods of the past. They are always searching for a better way, a new way to make their business successful. 

God has designed us to appreciate what worked well in the past and to tend to rely on that for how we will do things now. But God has also put into all of us the spark that wonders if there's a new, easier, more productive more beautiful way that we might try. I think about something as simple as the way the t-shirts are folded at stores like The Gap. Someone figured out this way that t-shirts could be folded in one fluid motion. It's efficient and it's beautiful. In fact it's kind of beautiful because it's so efficient. 

Are you a writer who wishes you had more time for that part of your life? Maybe God is nudging you a little and reminding you to use your creativity in every part of your day-to-day… in the way you fix cars or wait on people in a store or keep track of profits and losses or keep house or rear children or drive a taxi or even write songs.

The greatest artist of all has designed you to live a creative life.