They got me thinking about creativity again -- the need we each (yes, you too) have to exercise our creativity, our imagination.
When I paint or write something and someone really gets it, they are getting me. I have a friend who has never met me in person (but we've emailed a lot and talked on the phone and actually been through some tough stuff together), who said to me, "I forget I've never met you before. I read your writing and I feel like I know you."
And the way I write is the way I am so in a way she has (and if you read my writing a lot you know pretty well too).
Now, increase that by a million-billion-infinity and add perfection and we can kind of understand how we can know God a bit better when we enjoy His creation and/or when we are creating and loving it (meaning we get lost in it -- we lose track of time).
Michael Card writes in Scribbling in the Sand, "The imagination is the bridge between the heart and the mind, integrating both, allowing us to think/understand with our hearts and feel/emote with our minds. It is a vehicle for truth. Through the use of images, metaphors, stories and paradoxes that demand our attention, it calls for interaction. The imagination is a powerful means for communicating truths about God,
"God calls out to us, sings to us, paints images in our minds through the prophets' visions. These sounds and songs, these visions, stand at the door of our imaginations and knock. Through them God opens the door of his own inner life for us. He paints pictures of his hopes for our future as well as his worst nightmares of what is waiting for us if we choose to go on living without him."
Not only does God do this through His Word, but through every bit of His creation. Think how He speaks to you with His beauty when the sun sets or rises; when we see a baby born; when we feel a warm, gentle breeze on our faces and know it is God.
Card continues, "On the most superficial level, we learn from the prophets that the tools best suited for communicating to the imagination are images, parables and sometimes even bizarre activity! At a deeper level, we learn that if we are to effect a permanent change in people's hearts, we must do more than simply teach them facts or reduce them to some emotional experiences. Like the prophets, we must learn to reach out to the heart as well as the mind by speaking to the imagination."
That's why it matters if and/or when we exercise our creativity -- God will speak to us through it. He will reveal Himself to us. He will use it to speak to others. Plus, it is just great fun!
"After this I looked and there before me was a door standing open." Revelation 4:1