But where sin separates us from our Creator, what separates us from those parts of us that live to be inspired, that live to express the inexpressible?  What keeps us from being able to use this wondrous mentality and gift?  And how do we get back to a place where it’s a part of us again when we feel like we’ve lost it or it’s gone?

Some of us put away our creative concepts.  We get busy with the paths of our lives.  Careers, families, joyous gifts, terrible tragedies, good path choices, bad path choices, and distractions all swirl around us like a vortex that draws attention and time away from us.  For me, I walked away from it because of a damaged self-concept where I trusted nothing that came from within me or came from my perspective.  When I don’t write, I usually am farther and farther from God.  It’s because that when I get quiet enough to write, I usually can hear God’s voice reminding me of the things that are barriers between He and I.  That becomes painful, and I cannot tap into the creativity without being condemned by my own heart.  Sin is a horrible barrier to that divine source of creativity, and I’m a fallen man in need of intense grace.

It’s part discipline.  Creative types are notoriously either extremely obsessed with their craft or they sit waiting for inspiration.  For most who have enjoyed the touch of that moment, it’s easy to understand why many people who are creative turn to mood-altering substances to give us the ability to be there again, and again.   Either way, it is a revisiting of that mental place or that spiritual space over and over to have the opportunity to experience it again.  But, it’s that repetition of coming back to that place that allows us to be in touch with that creativity.

It’s also part motivation.  Sometimes the task at hand isn’t exactly like finishing a term paper so we can finish a class or get a good grade.  When we’re exposed to creativity, there isn’t a finality to it, only a temporary accomplishment followed by a searching for what’s next.  Sometimes it’s difficult to wake up inside and press forward to finish what has started.  The concept of inertia and overcoming it to me sometimes applies here.  It’s like having to overcome ourselves.  A wall that I must climb daily, just like Michael McDermott sang about.

It’s a partly a sense of desire.  It’s different from motivation in that wanting comes from a place of deep-seated need within ourselves.  A longing that cannot be fulfilled in any other way.  Like devotion to a cause, or a passionate love that only works with the object of that love to be in our presence.  It’s consuming and sustaining and enlightening and bewildering, all in one.

It’s lastly part identity.  When we are confronted with this gift, sometimes it becomes such a part of ourselves that it is inseparable from who we are.  Whether we incorporate it into our career or relationships or purpose in life, it establishes itself inside the concept of our self.  It is here where we come face to face with the utterly surreal understanding that we were in fact created to have a purpose.  And that, that is where we wrestle with being who we are to be.  In sync with God’s design.  A lesson we spend our lives chasing and letting Christ transform us into.

To be reassembled in such a way, means to not just become diligent with our craft.  It takes much more than the will to become better or more experienced.  Mere effort doesn’t make it happen.  We cannot create an environment of perspective and expect it to bear out in our lives.  Yes, we need that discipline, motivation, desire, and identity… but we need to be retapped.  Tapped again into the relationship with the master Creator.  To be intrinsically involved with the originator of imagination and inspiration…