Tuesday 10 July 2012

Pictures of Love blog 4 'Creativity'



As we journey on exploring what love means to us our next blog for Pictures of love comes from my superintendent minister Rev Stuart Earl... 

"It may seem egocentric or mercenary to have a photo of myself or my books under the heading "pictures of love", but read on. What I love is creativity - which for me at the moment is words and stories wrapped into thoughts about how the world and church and faith and love are and what they might be. I have dragged my own thoughts into two books so far published, and one (I hope) about to be published. It's not the money that I do it for (though I need to sell a few more before I can afford to publish the third!), but the risk of having a go, the thrill of completing it, and the risk of what others think of it. Because creativity involves risk - and thrills, and so, of course, does love.

Others of you will have other ways to be creative - the big creativity of producing and rearing children, or smaller projects such as how you decorate your home, how you order your garden, your appearance. Or it might be that you love music or art and have a go at them occasionally or that that is your "big thing". It might be photography, or poetry, or... When we are creative, we are illustrating that we are made in God's image, as the Bible says. He created, so can we. You can't love without having something or somebody to respond to, to risk rejection from, to engage with, to give yourself to. That's what God does with us. That's what, I suppose, in a strange way, we do when we share our creativity with others. Thank God, right now as you read this, for the ways in which you can be creative."

1 comment:

  1. Actually, it's not anonymous, it's Elaine Lindridge. I just can't work out how to create an account (which is ironic when posting on the subject of creativity!)
    Sometimes I sense God in the creativity of others even if they don't profess faith in God themselves. So for example in the words of a song, or in a piece of music.... I guess as you rightly say, because God is creative, we will all have a sense of creativity within because we were made in Gods image. Whether we realise that or not, or whether we think we are very creative or not. It's often more obvious within children, They create things, pictures, stories, a mess! It's part of their very nature. They don't wonder if it's good enough - they just create.

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