Don’t you just love your brain?! I think it’s absolutely about the best thing God invented when He made us! Such a brilliant idea. And I believe He wants us to use it to be out-of-the-box creative whenever and however possible.
During the summer of 2016 – fighting stage 4 metastatic kidney cancer – I went through extremely grueling chemotherapy. By September, I had not only lost a ton of weight but also all my hair. My head was akin to a good looking bowling ball. Ughhhh.
My daughters, sympathetic souls that they are, thought it would be a great time for mom to have her head tattooed. Crazy kids – like what had they been smokin’? Turned out they wanted me to get a henna tattoo which wears off after about five weeks. After clinking the idea around in my chemo-brain for awhile, I thought – why not?! So henna-head happened and I never looked back. It was indeed pretty cool and even nurses at City of Hope all wanted to check it out.
But even then, being sick as a dog, I recall thinking that I didn’t want to settle for ho-hum. As David Campbell writes, “If you are living a hum-drum life, and you do nothing to change it, ten years from now you will be a product of ten more years of hum-drumidness.” God has done such an magnificent job of forming each of us into a unique, one-of-a-kind person, this life gift should never be wasted.
We all have the God-given creativity to be full of His zoe life – fully alive and full of passion for life! But I will admit this takes focus, hard work, commitment…and enthusiasm. That amazing word actually comes from the Greek word meaning “God within” – imagine that! The Spirit of Him who created the solar system, oceans, zebras, starfish, and eggplant, lives in us! That miraculous Divine spark! But there’s a catch to being out-of-the-box creative. Can you guess what it is? It’s something that’s available to all of us, it’s our choice to use or not, and it’s free. Ready? It’s bravery.
Not bravery in terms of facing some big hairy, green scaled monster, but bravery to simply be you – accessing and summoning every ounce of creative juice you have and then doing something with it. Alan Alda put it this way: “Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can’t get there by bus but only by hard work and risk. And by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful, what you’ll discover will be yourself.” If we think about it, what would our world be without brave souls venturing out of the bonds of worldly logic and rational to create, design and develop astounding feats.
Here are just a few names of Christ-followers who bravely trekked outside the norm with their God-given brains: Christopher Columbus, Gutenberg, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Sir Isaac Newton, Mozart, Louis Pasteur, Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Tesla, George Washington Carver, Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, Galileo, Winston Churchill and George Washington. The list goes on and on! Imagine the odds these people were up against, but with a spirited seed from God those daunting odds were surely diminished. Check out how Tyler Perry – another Christ-follower – views all this: “It doesn’t matter if a million people tell you what you can’t do, or if ten million tell you no.
If you get one yes from God that’s all you need!” Will Rogers said: “We can’t all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been much good at curb-sitting! So, let’s see: curb-sitter or brave soul? Curb-sitter – brave soul? Our choice it seems!
Bob and Susan Beckett pastor The Dwelling Place City Church at 27100 Girard Street in Hemet. For more information you can visit them at DPCityChurch.org
Susan Beckett • Dwelling Place City Church
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