Occasionally I peruse my database of quotes, sifting for just the right encouragement for us. Here’s a few insights from Walking on Water by Madeleine L’ Engle that you’re sure to ponder. While I don’t always agree with her viewpoints, here is much to distill:
“I lived far too much in an interior world, but I did learn that I didn’t have to be qualified according to the world’s standards in order to write my stories.”
“Creativity is a way of living life, no matter what our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts or having some kind of important career.”
“If our lives are truly ‘hid with Christ in God,’ the astounding thing is that this hiddenness is revealed in all that we do and say and write. What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.”
“The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama.”
“In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory.”
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
on October 21, 2009 - 7:10 pm
He takes the foolish things to confound the wise… It is so true that when we sit and begin to muse about our life and if we put it to pen or with the stroke of a brush or music notes on the page it will reflect the heart of us.. It is impossible to reduce the God in us to a mere emotion when in fact the God in us is the only life we have.. It comes to the surface without being invited to do so..
on October 21, 2009 - 8:07 pm
Hi Denise, yes, for the believer, God is continually expressing His Spirit through our gifts and personalities as we abide in Him. Good to hear from you, friend!
on October 21, 2009 - 8:52 pm
I so want to agree. I think if we are tending to the Holy Spirit deposit in us, then the God in us rises. But if we tend more to the things of this world, then as a great writer once stated the Holy Spirit in us becomes as a baby that “fails to thrive” and become a dull light in us rather than a bright burning fire. I think it was in the the N.T. it says something along the lines of “not putting out the Spirits’ fire in us….” (paraphrased in the gospel according to Iris :-}) So as I think on those words about not putting out the Holy Spirit’s fire in each of us I realize our “self man” is very powerful because God is forever and always a gentleman and if we choose to live even bare minimum good lives but fail to feed the Holy Spirit, then my query becomes:is that “God within” us going to rise like He would if we fed it regularly? Sorry My mind went down a thought process and I am still walking it through. I believe in the quick process part that no it wouldn’t.
I so want God to be the center of all that comes out of my work. I pray I can reflect him even a little as I work on my craft.
Thank you so much for the thoughts that cause a processing of my own belief’s to be allowed to happen. (so sorry this was so long….blushing face inserted here.)
on November 1, 2009 - 4:15 am
Victoria;
Thank you for introducing the subject. I find that if I go deep with the Spirit, that is sit quietly with Him and journal, but most of all LISTEN to Him. It opens up wellsprings of creativity in me. My mind is old and cranky, but He makes it new and responsive. Jesus is the first and best artist anyway, since He created everything. So He knows all about it.
I live in northern Colorado so I don’t have to travel far to see amazing instances of His handiwork. But you know it has been that way wherever I’ve lived (Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Mississippi). There is something powerful about the great rolling prairies when green with the first grasses of spring, or blooming with wild flowers, or covered with snow or the Mississippi frozen, with the current grinding up weird shapes in the ice. He is so wonderful to us and so very few people really understand it.
My wife and I were driving back home to Colorado from eastern Iowa once, and we decided to get off the Interstate and take a state highway through western Iowa. It was quite late at night when we noticed the milky way. We just had to stop and get out of the car and soak it in. Out there with so few towns and lights it was like you could see almost every star, incredible numbers of stars. Out there, unlike the city, there are no black spaces between the brightest ones, there are stars everywhere you look. It is one of those things which, like the gorgeous sunsets He paints, if you can’t appreciate them, you must be dead.
I believe that He uses these things to call us. And once we respond, He begins to develop the gifts which may have been latent in our hearts. He wants us to be in complete fellowship with Him, partly because He made us that way (and He loves us), and partly so that we might tell others about it. So open that door, ask Him in, He might just re-arrange your heart, and put in an art room.
Nathan