I recently saw this add at a public transit stop that is supposedly going up across Canada. No one quite knows what it’s for.
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We had an awesome anniversary. I don’t know about other guys, but every year I think, how on earth am I going to top the last year?
This year my goal was to spend no more than ten bucks on the night (I was so tempted to do the fancy dinner thing, but that’d just be too easy, wouldn’t it?)
I told Yvz that we had reservations (it was with the sunset) and we rushed out the door as our friend Gloria babysat.
We headed down to the beach and roller-bladed by the shore to find our food.
I was banking on a hotdogs (My wife loves hotdogs oddly) and Ed’s Real Scoop (a popular ice cream shop downtown) to keep it under five bucks each.
Unfortunately, I was shocked we weren’t able to find any hotdog stands! We ended up caving into some random sushi place (it was okay, hotdogs would have been way better)
I’ve got a bit of a fascination with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, so Yvonne made some for me from scratch! Check out how colossal hers were compared to the puny originals!
Earlier in the day I organized a speed-art project where we would both paint something that we loved about the other person.
Amazingly we had very similar concepts, though different ways of expressing it.
Yvonne’s, depicted my ‘fiery’ passion in the darkness, and how it lit up ’sparks’ in other people. the folks to the right is our family (click for a close up), I love the cute baby Stellar she painted in!
Mine, was a silhouette of my wife and how God so often pierces her heart and brings about life-changing conviction. But it never just stops there. It always erupts out of her soul as she longs to share her passion with others, bringing light to those around her.
We painted them on canvas paper and added them to a new book of memories we’ll be creating together… memories we hope to be celebrating for all eternity.
It’s been quite the adventure! Here’s a few pictures from The National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY.
I’m in the bottom left corner tugging the car seat because the trunk was too full to get the stroller out!
Continuing our Creativity & Spirituality series.
When it comes to creativity quantity quite often must preside over quality, at least initially. Yvz always tells me how the kids that she teaches always struggle with spelling when they are writing stories. She continuously encourages them to just make it up and simply get their ideas down and write their stories, but they still seem to get hung up on spelling.
So often many of us are just like that. We lose incredible and imaginative ideas and fail to truly hear God’s voice because we’re stuck on the details.
Everyone was asked to spend 8-10 minutes brainstorming and jotting down what heaven would be like (This portion was inspired by David Arcos at Humana 2.0).
We took this exercise a step further and did some rapid prototyping. A large banner was laid out and everyone was asked to think of items on their list that they wanted to personally be involved with bringing to earth. Everyone was invited to paint and draw their commitments in this communal artistic exercise.
Maybe when we pray “Thy kingdom come, on earth, as it is in heaven”, we’re actually suppose to be doing something about it? Maybe Maybe the subtle hints of heaven in the Scriptures and our capacity to imagine this heaven might be so that we could make it a reality here on earth? How might you make God’s invisible presence into a physical reality?
Have you ever been out walking, noticed a dog, and stopped to play with it, and then realized you never once even looked at the owner in the eye? I did once, and when I looked back I saw look of disgust staring back at my blind eye.
A friend of mine came by a while back and jokingly asked if he could borrow Stellar… “Because chicks dig dudes with babies and dogs”
Lets break it down from a few angles.
Dude’s perspective. Why is it that we feel we need to accessorize ourselves for others to notice us? Could it be that somewhere down below I don’t think another human being would like me, just for me?
Chick’s perspective. Why is it that we have no problems giving direct and caring eye contact to babies and dogs? Could it be because we’ve been hurt by others in the past? Could it be because we know that dogs and babies won’t judge us? Or is it we who’ve judged, and ignored people because we see them as less than that? Less than God’s wonderfully divine creation. Less than the broken image of God longing to be restored. Less than beautiful?
Babies and dogs. When I look at my daughter, she is like neither of the above two. Stellar just is, the way she is. She doesn’t pretend or hold back feelings. She doesn’t judge and calculate whether you’re worth her time. The whole world fascinates her. She naively assumes the best of every person and that as another human being, you must care for her. Connecting and interacting with you, is her greatest joy.
Maybe this is why we’re drawn to babies and dogs. Though they may be raw and unrefined, we resonate with their authenticity. They just are the way they are.
And maybe if we were, the way we really were, we’d be more compelling, unique, and creative.
Imagine a community where people simply came as they are, flaws and all. Where they connected and interacted at the deepest levels of humanity. Where they actively helped one another become the unique person that God created them to be. That to me, is what the church ought to be.
A simple exercise we had in the class was to meaningfully finish the sentence -
“If you really knew me, you would know that…”
This is the closest photo I could find on the theme of today’s post. Ever seen The Neverending Story?
Continuing on our Creativity & Spirituality series.
Groups of four were gathered and given a single styrofoam cup. Everyone was invited to communicate to one another what their hopes for the church might be.
The only catch was that they could only communicate in silence through manipulating the styrofoam cup.
What we discovered during the process…
- The simplicity of the object forced us to think of ideas that we did not have before
- There was an admiration of how people were able to creatively express themselves with the object, gesturing, positioning, tearing, ripping, shaping, and decimating it.
- Those who might not speak up otherwise, were heard
- Because people took turns to manipulate the object, we learned that quite often the reality is that we rarely are offered a clean slate. Much of our work often must be built upon the impact of others before us.
- One group thought outside the box and found my stash of additional cups. Most of us often assume that we can only work with the resources that we have been given, not what we might have ‘access’ to.
- Our community of faith is latent with ideas that have not been expressed until people had an opportunity to communicate through a different medium
Continuing on our Creativity & Spirituality series.
I’ve been at IKEA seven times in the last eight days. I’ve found it extremely conducive for my school work, writing, scheming & dreaming. It’s got an excellent $1 breakfast, bottomless coffee or drinks, and a LACK of an internet connection.
I absolutely love having the world at my fingertips, but when it comes to my personal creativity and spiritual formation, the abundance that is offered by the internet doesn’t really help me.
There, I’ve said it. I know my wife will use this against me the rest of my life now.
There’s an interesting poster on the wall at IKEA that describes how their designers always begin by fixing a set low price before designing anything. ie. check out this simple innovation.
They say this forces their designers and engineers to be inventive and creative.
Could it be that our creativity and spirituality have been stifled because we have too much?
Here’s a great video of someone painting with simply ketchup and fries.
Continuing the series on Creativity and Spirituality, the song writers today are the prophets and poets of our time.
I think I’ve spent all my life looking for myself and God within music. My wife can attest to the number of songs I rant about endlessly in where I find faith and song converging.
Here’s just one song that rocks and speaks at the same time.
Some say love is not for sinners
I believe that isn’t true
‘Cause when I was finished sinning
Love came down and showed me you
And you told me how to get there
So I tried to find a way
Then I ran into your garden
But I tripped out the gate
I tripped out the gate
What are you doing to me?
I’m so into you
And the hardest part is knowing
That I’ll never follow through
You’re slowly killing me
And I wish it wasn’t true
Cause I’m so into you
Like a ton of bricks it hit me
And woke me from this dream
No matter how hard I tried to wash my hands
I could never get ‘em clean
I could never get ‘em clean
The dude’s clearly writing it to a girl, but do you see how it echoes the story of Christ? It highlights our complete inability to make things ‘right’ even after coming to faith. Faith is this endless journey, and there are parts in it where you ‘trip out the gate’ and find yourself lost in such beauty it’s undeniable.
Other songs people mentioned in our class included songs by K’OS, Rufus Wainwright, Edwin, Coldplay, ruben studdard, and Sarah McLachlan… anyone else got others?
Innovation is a subset of creativity. It is about taking something that exists and transforming it into something new that is equally if not more extraordinary and beautiful.
If you know anything about religious culture, it often has an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality. We’re the chosen few and the rest of the world is going to hell. Keep yourselves pure by staying away from the culture.
However over and over again in the Scriptures, it describes Jesus and the people of God engaging the culture. Though what they said and did at times were counter-cultural, they did it in a way that encountered-culture.
In Titus 1:12-13, Paul recites and approves the words of a pagan prophet. The book of Acts describes Paul in Athens quoting and affirming the Greek poets of the time. One would have to imagine that for Paul to do so, he must have been attentive to, studied, and reflected upon the people, the literature and art of his culture.
The Apostle Paul was an innovator.
He was able to look into the world around him. See the traces of God that was there. Re-frame it and translate it back to the culture in a way that allowed them to see the beauty and wonder of God in more rich and profound ways.
One of the assignments was to find a song on the radio (ie. not a ‘Christian” song), where you discover deep spiritual truths of God within… got any?
Continuing our Creativity & Spirituality series…
Seeing the Divine, takes time.
In Exodus, after wandering the dessert for forty-years, it describes Moses seeing something there he had not ever seen before. He encounters a bush that did not seem to ‘burn up’.
As Moses approaches he discovers God calling out to him from within the bush saying “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5)
How long had Moses walked through that piece of land, never realizing that it was holy?
Or the better question might be, how long had Moses been staring at that bush to realize that it was not burning up? That it wasn’t some minor forest fire, but that there was something mystical occurring?
In the book of Mark it describes a centurion standing in front of Jesus upon the cross, hearing him cry, and watching him die. After which he comes to the realization that “Surely this man was the son of God!” (Mark 15:39).
The same question applies. How long was the centurion gazing at the cross, before he realized that he was seeing God?
Could it be that God is closer than we think?
If only we took the time to really look?
The Scriptures describe this man named Jacob who after reflecting on a dream and discovers, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” (Genesis 28:17).
In our Creativity & Spirituality gatherings, one of our assignments was to take a digital photo or find a photo of something or somewhere we saw a glimpse God in someway. Here’s a collage of some of what came out of it.
Mine was the ‘tank man’ picture. I see God in the regular Joe that has the courage to stand against oppressive forces in the world.
What if the whole earth was actually filled with the glory of God?
What if all of creation is groaning and hoping for even more beauty yet to be revealed?
What if since the beginning of time all creation has been screaming out that there is more to life than the visible?
* You can read a bit more on this from a previous post at the vox bookclub.
So I found some old unwanted tiles underneath the deck of my friends’ home, left discarded by the previous owner.
I brought them to our creativity and spirituality class and had each student choose a tile. They were extremely grimy so they were each asked to go wash them off. As they cleaned the dirt off of the tiles they were instructed to imagine themselves as the tile being cleansed by the hands of God.
Some tables were put together with a large blue camping tarp laid over it. This again was to stimulate a fresh environment that was also conducive to creative messiness. Dollar store paint and brushes were laid out.
Somewhat inspired by Steve Taylor’s “The out of bounds church“, everyone was asked to silently reflect, imagine, and paint as I read from Genesis 1, while Moby’s track “God moving over the face of the waters” was playing. mp3 of shortened version of God moving over the face of the waters
This is what we created when we put sixteen tiles together…
When God created us as creative beings, he must’ve known that we were going to make a mess of things.
Attempting to creatively teach creativity for me had its share of unfortunate incidences as well.
I should have known better that with candles and crayons available people would’ve put the creatively put the two together and caused a toxic fire.
I popped popcorn in class (to represent the anticipation of the Israelites in repeated exodus and our current anticipation of a new heaven and earth). However I accidentally bought a cheddar brand that really stank up the room.
People in the class jotted down their sins of the ways in which they have not been their unique creative selves. I was going collect the pieces of paper to set up a small controlled bonfire, but because of the above two mishaps and limited ventilation we had to skip it.
Some creative ideas simply point us to what not to do again.
However I believe most creative failures, are simply successes deferred.
They’re steps towards something beautiful.
Maybe in the right space and time, or with further innovation, no creative idea needs to go to waste.
Have you ever had any creative failures?
Might any of them be on the verge of something beautiful?
During our Creativity & Spirituality sessions I attempted to creatively take people through the overarching narrative of the Scriptures.
One simple and interesting exercise (inspired in a different context by Phyllis of Sketch) was this…
Take a moment and jot down the three most important and treasured things, ideas, or people in your life today.
My class had crayons and paper to write or draw this out, but that doesn’t mean you should just gloss over the question.
…
I’ll give you another moment.
…
It’s okay if you can only think of two. (so sad).
…
Done?
…
Now I want you to imagine that these things or people no longer exist…
…
They’ve been taken from you.
You’ve lost it.
It’s been ripped away from your soul.
…
Now, describe in a word or two how you feel…
(I’ll debrief on this a bit afterwards)
Continuing our series on Creativity, and the last post on being the ‘workmanship’ of God the Master Artist, let me introduce you to someone special…
She has 300 bones. Yet no knee caps.
She can’t sit or stand on her own. Yet her thighs are becoming stronger than concrete.
She is incapable of saying a word. Yet she is able to replace a million blood cells every single second.
She has the most ridiculous smile.
She has her mother eyes, and her father’s genetic disorder (G6PD).
And of the 6.5 billion people who walk the earth today, and of the 90 billion people who have ever existed, not one person has ever had the identical DNA, fingerprints, personality, strengths, and creative gift mix that she possesses.
Her name is Stellar Voxanna, and she is my daughter.
She is an original work of art.
And if you don’t know it yet.
So are you.
Years back I was taught to memorize Ephesians 2:8-9. It speaks of how every one of us have been saved by grace through faith, and that it is not something we alone can work ourselves towards, but it is a beautiful gift from God should we be willing to receive it.
However as wonderful as that truth is, it never quite did it for me. Not that grace wasn’t enough, because I’m well aware of how messed up I am. But I had this gnawing feeling of… Well, now what? I had been saved by grace through faith, just like the next dude. So very ordinary.
But then I discovered the very next verse. Ephesians 2:10 which says that we are “God’s Workmanship”.
That word workmanship comes from the Greek, poema.
Every human being is God’s poem. Artwork. Masterpiece.
God is the Master Artist.
Who creates not with paint and sculpture, but with living flesh and spirit.
There is nothing ‘ordinary’ about that which has been created by the hands of the Master Artist
Ever hear one of those messages that attempted to prove the existence of God with the fact that the Scriptures begin with “In the beginning God…” ?
Whether there’s a God or not aside, what I love about the Scriptures is the way it describes God.
Taking that entry point into Genesis further, it declares “In the beginning, God created…”
He created.
He doesn’t just sit there.
He doesn’t just think about stuff.
He doesn’t just hope.
He Creates.
He’s the Creator. A Creative being. Creating is core to what he does.
And then the Scriptures state that He created us, you and I, in his Image and Likeness.
What part of that don’t we understand?
In our ‘class’ people are gathered in groups of four. To share not necessarily a ‘testimony’ but an experience or a moment in which they felt God became in anyway possibly more real to them.
What is it about sharing in smaller groups? Is it the defusing of fear in an intimate environment? Is it the lack of competing voices in the group? Is it because there might be lesser likelihood of someone ridiculing or rejecting their thoughts, feelings, or ideas?
Whatever it is, it seems to almost always stimulate better discussions.
Point of the exercise - there are so many distinct ways in which people have encountered God in the past - through relationships, prayer, meditation, media, intrinsic longings, unique circumstances, etc.
Why is it that going forward we often only advocate a limited number of ways of continuing the journey with God? Ie. Read your bible, and make sure you come to church…?
Entering the room - I tried to create an environment that was different from any thing people were use to. Lights were shut off. Candles were scattered. Tables were covered with kraft paper from Montana’s Restaurant. Crayons were distributed for doodling. Music like U2’s “City of Blinding Lights” played.
I did this not because it was cool, or even for ambiance, but to help break people out of routines. Leading educators tell us that when people enter what is known as a ‘classroom’, after years of being a part of stale educational institutions our brains simply disengage as we sit down for more of the same old.
On a side note, in university during the rare moments I attended class, I fought desperately to stay awake. Quite honestly I had just about a hundred percent hit ratio of not making it to the end of the lecture conscious.
I would sit up at the front of the class hoping I would stay attentive fueled by the guilt of falling asleep directly in front of the professor. It didn’t work.
I would try to engage myself by furiously writing notes, just to keep my hands moving, only to wake up finding sentences that turned to gibberish as my pen slid down the page.
What I finally discover did work, was snacking on chips and high-sugared drinks, and even that failed to work at times. I recall loading up a hot dog with the works before class, and waking up discovering a trail of toppings running down my jacket with the hot dog in my lap!
How else might we create environments where people are creatively engaged?
Here’s an interesting link I just found on developing brain-compatible classrooms.
Over the next while the bulk of my writings will center around Spirituality & Creativity.
I just finished teaching a four-week series on the topic and I hope to offer readers a glimpse into it, while fleshing out more of the thoughts and experiences that arose.
Together (that means you), I hope to explore with you how Spirituality & Creativity relate, how they necessitate one another, as well as biblical foundations, and some practical expressions of our God-given creativity.
If we are created in the image and likeness of the Creator, then we too are creative beings. How is it that followers Jesus are more known for conformity and standardization than the revolutional and innovative ways of Christ?
I’m teaching a series of classes of classes this March on “Experiencing God through the Creative Journey“.
If anyone else has any ideas on creatively teaching creativity, whether it’s through biblical foundations, practical expressions, or corporate experiences that can be facilitated, I’d love to hear about them.
The current session titles are:
Creativity through the Creator God
Creativity through Creation - Community & Culture
Creativity through Creating CrossCultural Environments
I have way more ideas than I have time for already, but after the series is over, I’ll be posting my thoughts and what comes out of the experience, especially if we use any of your ideas!
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