The value of creativity

 Some years ago I read Tom Wright’s Surprised by Hope, and found it a great book overall.   

One morning I was reading it in the bath and had a kind of ‘understanding’ about what he was saying.

He talks all the time about how Jesus’ Resurrection opens the door for us to be resurrected too, but not just that, it enables us to live in the new heaven and new earth that God will bring about in due course. There is hope both in the future and here in the now. The now suddenly has much greater importance than many Christians give it credit for. I knew this already, in a sense, because I’ve long been a believer in the fact that we will be resurrected and live in a home that is like this earth only much greater. We will truly be at home.

But something else hit me: over last few months I’d been ‘tidying up.’ Tidying up things like getting my favourite watch repaired, getting two pictures sorted out, one to be framed for the first time and another to be reframed. Tidying up my music, and thinking about printing out the drafts of two novels so I could do some real work on them, instead of letting them slide. Writing new music for another concert. Getting the computer fixed so that it worked properly. Having one of my daughters and her four-year-old son come to live with us long term, upstairs, filling the space in the house left after my mother’s death. 

I thought that perhaps I was doing all this because I had an unconscious premonition that I might not have long to live. Then it occurred to me (thanks to Mr Wright) that these are all things that show hope. I wasn’t doing all these because of gloom, or wanting to clean up things for an imminent death (even though that’s always a possibility), but because I had hope: the watch was worth fixing, the pictures were worth hanging, the computer was worth getting repaired and upgraded.

And it was wonderful that morning to have life in the house again, with a four-year-old banging and crashing around in the morning, because daylight saving hadn’t affected him yet! 

None of these things are ‘utterly’ important in any eternal terms – there are of course far more important things – but they were still important. 

The watch continued to convey meaning in itself because it was a particular gift from my wife.

The two pictures had special meaning for us: we’d bought one early in our marriage, as a couple. Only a few weeks before my revelation in the bath the picture had fallen off its hook in the middle of the night. It would have fallen on our heads if ‘by chance’ we hadn’t moved the bed to a different place in the room a week or two earlier.

The other picture was a detailed brass rubbing my wife did when she went to England with our oldest daughter. For many years it had been carefully rolled up to avoid creases. Now might be the time to show it in all its glory.

The creative things were important, not because they focused on me, I realised, but because they’re part of God’s output through me. He doesn't ‘use’ me as a channel: He’s given me the ability to create ‘on his behalf’ – to put it rather badly. 

Perhaps through Wright’s book, and through my own reflections, I was finally getting some sense of why I do creative things, and why they’re worth doing.