Maybe the desire to make something beautiful

is the piece of God that is inside each of us.

Mary Oliver, “Franz Marc’s Blue Horses”

Want to know the secret to how I write blog posts? I listen. I listen to the messages that I receive in sermons, Bible studies, poetry, even social media. And when I get the same message multiple times in a week, I pay attention – and then I write.

Pretty uncreative, huh?

I never really considered myself creative, certainly not creative enough to develop a website, write blog posts, and design social media posts! And yet, that’s what I’ve been doing for almost a year.

And I actually really love it.

I originally wasn’t going to set up an Instagram account for Come So Alive. But as I developed the website, I had something in mind I wanted to include yet could not figure out how to make it work. Then I saw the Instagram icon that could automatically feed to the website and I realized that was exactly what I needed.

Because it turns out, I was creating Instagram posts in 2014 before I even had a personal account.

After Cody’s epilepsy diagnosis that fall, I found myself sitting in front of the computer adding Bible verses and song lyrics to pictures I had taken, many from a trip to Cape Cod in 2006. It was my lifeline in the storm, a little insert of color into a really dark autumn.

Then last fall once I started planning what I wanted to include in Come So Alive’s resources, I immediately thought of these pictures and wanted to share them in case someone else needed to see some color, read words of hope.

I have a whole folder on my computer of pictures I did this with, partly needing something to cling to but more so doing it without really knowing why I was doing it, just feeling a compulsion to create in my grief.

The beautiful thing about them was that I was rather disappointed in them when I first took them. I had a feeling of what I wanted them to be as I framed them in my camera, but the actual photos just seemed lacking once I developed them (back in the days of film!).

Then amazingly, as I added words to them eight years later, they suddenly became what I thought they would be initially. It turns out they were actually lacking. They lacked a piece of God that I hadn’t needed yet. But they were ready and waiting for that future time when I would need them.

God was ready and waiting with those pictures, knowing in 2006 what awaited me in 2014 and already clearing a way for me, showing me His steps to follow, giving me a place to rest and wait.

I created beauty and hope and reminders that God was in the storm with me from those pictures.

Monday, I read the above Mary Oliver quote on Facebook and remembered I had underlined it in her book, Devotions, to use for an Instagram Come So Alive post. Then on Wednesday, I read this on Instagram:

“There’s something about creativity that disarms the powers of darkness. … God has given you creativity as a weapon of warfare. What does your creativity look like?”

Bill Johnson, Bethel Church/@Bethel

Creativity doesn’t have to mean you are a gifted musician. You may not be a renowned painter (or even an amateur one). But you are creative. God gave you something, some way of creating, of making beauty in this often-dark world.

Create a memory with someone. Bring laughter, hope, kindness to a hard situation. Dance with your kids. Write a message on the sidewalk in chalk. Bake someone a pie.

It doesn’t matter how, but wield your weapon of creativity this weekend.