Other People Are Creative And I Am Not

You say it easily, the way people say facts.

Somebody asks whether you make anything and you say no, I am not a creative person, and there is no distress in it. It is not a complaint. It is more like saying you are not tall. You have sorted yourself into a category and the sorting happened so long ago that it does not feel like an opinion any more.

So let me ask the only question that matters here, and I want you to actually look for the answer.

Who told you?

Because somebody did. There is almost always a moment. A teacher who put your work up or did not. A sibling who was the artistic one, which quietly made you the other thing. A comment at eleven years old that you have not thought about in decades and that is still doing its work.

And here is what happened next, which is the real damage. You did not conclude that you had less practice at something. You concluded something about your type. You decided there are creative people and there are people like you, and that these are two kinds of person, and that the line between them is fixed and you are on the far side of it.

That line does not exist. Not as a fact about kinds of people, and specifically not in the book that tells you what kind of thing you are.

In the image of God created he him

There is a sentence at the very front of the Bible, and where it sits is part of what it means.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (Genesis 1:27, King James Version)

In the image of God created he him.

Now, what has God been doing for the whole page before that sentence? Making things. That is all that has happened. Light, water, land, the growing things, the creatures. Twenty-five verses of a Maker making, and at the end of it He makes a creature and the one thing said about that creature is that it is in His image.

The first thing we ever learn about God is that He makes. And the first thing we are ever told about ourselves is that we are like Him.

That is not a motivational line and I am not going to turn it into one. It is a statement about what kind of thing a human being is, made about every human being on the page, with no exceptions listed and no category of people set aside as the ones who are not like that.

There is no verse anywhere that divides humanity into makers and non makers. That division came from a classroom, or a family, or a comment. It did not come from here.

You carry the image of a Maker, and there has never once been a clause in that sentence excluding you from it. Genesis 1:27 says in the image of God created he him after a whole page of God making things, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies a sentence about all people to the one person who has filed themselves outside it.

Creative is not a personality

Here is the second thing, and it is more practical.

The word creative has been captured. It has come to mean a personality: a certain kind of person, expressive, visual, probably untidy, who has ideas in the shower. And measured against that description you are correctly identifying that you are not it.

But that is a description of a temperament, not of an ability to make something. Making is what a person does when they take material and change it into something else on purpose. Nothing in that requires a temperament. A quiet, orderly, unimaginative person can make things all their life, and plenty have.

So the sentence you keep saying is true and irrelevant at the same time. You are not that personality. You were never asked to be.

You are able to make things without being a certain sort of person, and it has never once required a temperament you do not have. The written word grounds making in what a human being IS rather than in what a human being is like, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates an identity from a personality type.

Make something functional and ugly

So here is the assignment, and I have chosen it carefully to be the opposite of what the word creative suggests.

Make something entirely functional and ugly, on purpose.

Something with a job. A thing to hold a door, a box for the things that live on that shelf, a stand for the thing that keeps falling over. It should be useful and it should look bad, and the looking bad is deliberate so that you cannot fail at it.

I am asking for this because everything you have been told about creativity is aesthetic, and every aesthetic goal hands you a way to be disqualified. A useful ugly object cannot disqualify you. It either holds the door or it does not.

And when it is done, use it. Put it where it belongs and let it do its job. That is the part that will surprise you.

Genesis 1:27 puts the image of a Maker on ordinary people rather than on artistic ones, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in something clumsy that works.

You are able to take material and change it into something on purpose, and that has never once required you to be artistic. Genesis 1:27 says in the image of God created he him without listing exceptions, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody making an ugly thing that holds a door.