CREATE

Right now, at this very minute as I write, I’m surrounded by Creatives. I’m at a writers’ retreat in Normandy, France and the eclectic mixture of people around me have only two things in common… they are writers and they are people of The Faith.

Awesome time! Talking! Eating! Drinking French wine! More eating and lots and lots more talking. Wherever you perch yourself at almost any time of the day or night, the range of your auditory circle is filled with the sounds of multiple voices trading tips, sharing secrets, asking advice. This is the time and place for the storyteller to emerge from the hidden places and let loose… there’s always someone willing to listen… and everyone is willing to talk.

What I love is that no one has come to this round table as ‘The Expert’, even though several people really are expert at their craft. Those who’ve been published many times have taken the learner’s posture, and those who are just beginning to think about what to write and how to write it are given the same dignity, their points of view are listened to with the same respect as the well known author. You sure can’t tell who’s who by watching the way people relate.

I love that.

I love being with Creatives, but I especially love the writers. These are they who… like God… create worlds out of nothing, populating them with people and events, tragedies and triumphs, the mundane, the astonishing and the flat-out ridiculous.

Just think: in English there are 26 letters of the alphabet (I’m not about to guess how many letters are in the alphabets of other languages – especially not Oriental languages, but suffice to say, the amount of letters in any language is finite) and yet those letters frame and populate whole worlds…

Time and space, class and race, pedantic, romantic, erotic, despotic, wars and peaces, songs and sonnets of tragic loss and wonderful victories, parables of power, tall tales and true, ethereal tales of faery worlds and the grandiose spin of political posturing… they’re ALL built out of those 26 letters.

Can you imagine it? If you can imagine it, and if you are able to tell it to others, a(nother) totally new universe has been created for people to get lost in.

I love that God didn’t build the world with His hands. He didn’t sit at a draughtsman’s desk, designing and redesigning until He had it just right and then get out His tools and go to work with His hands and His hammer on the shaping of summer.

Hebrews 11:3 Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God, so that things which are not seen were not made of things which do appear.

God looked at the emptiness all around Him, the dark, deep wastes of confusion…

…and then He spoke

…and Light was created, and the earth took shape, and the framework for the seasons emerged from the mists of nothingness … and the world as we know it was formed, becoming a vast stage upon which the continuing story of humanity’s relationship with their God can be played out.

And each of us, for a tiny moment in timeless eternity, become the heroes and the villains – and angels watch and wonder at the Creator who allows His creation to take their own turns at creating with their own words, whether what they end up creating is good or bad, right or wrong.

For the truth is that all we who are of the human race are made in His image, whether we believe it or not and whether we like it or not. And a major component of His image is the ability to create our own and other people’s worlds with our words.

How many people are still convinced they are stupid, ugly, worthless and doomed to fail forever, because someone whose word appeared to carry truth planted that lie into their lives at a most vulnerable time.

How many people still live out those lies today, despite great longing to be free and yearning to be whole. We reinforce, with our own words, the world of disappointment and dishonour that was created for us by those who spoke cruel, destructive words into our lives.

How long does it take us to learn that it need not be so? That the God who created us has given us the power to exchange the Truth of His opinion of us for the lies that have been spoken? And… bizarrely, astonishingly… changing the words we speak is key to that… not just over ourselves and our own lives, but our situation, our jobs, our families and friends and nations.

God spoke LIGHT into the darkness and the darkness became LIGHT. He spoke mountains and oceans and hills and plains and ice flows and jungles and lakes – and from the words He used, they came into being. He spoke giraffes and ants and pigs and turtles and kookaburras and sloths and koalas and whales and puffins and ostriches and hamsters and cod…

and whaddaya know? They BECAME!

They didn’t exist anywhere except in His heart before He spoke and… then they were there.

The only thing that God seems to have crafted with His own hands is mankind – two genders built into one body that He then carefully separated to become distinct but matching beings, crafted out of the same raw material.

Our words have such power; they can build anything. They create worlds of grace and acceptance, courage and love, fear and failure, delight and despair, adventure and romance. When we write those words down, a world that didn’t exist comes into being… and those who read what we’ve written might be inspired to resolve to be different because of what they read.

Did I tell you that I love writers? We emulate the Creator in a unique way as our words build the things that reside in our hearts. God looked at what He’d created and commented to Himself how good it was. The creative process carries within it the capacity to draw from God – we are designed that way. I love that we can write what He had in mind and that He might look at it and comment how good it is.

Originally Published in SheLovesMagazine October Edition