The Artisan Soul (10 page)

“So one day I said to Kim, ‘I have an idea. Let's just take the vegetables, throw them in the backyard, and put him outside to play. Maybe he'll start eating them with the dirt and the rocks.'

“My wife, Kim, didn't think this was the guide to better parenting, so the strategy was a no-go. But we didn't give up on Aaron. We kept feeding him vegetables and working to convince him that rocks are bad for his teeth and terrible for the digestion. Eventually he got it. I can tell you with great certainty and no small amount of pride that my twenty-four-year-old son no longer eats dirt and rocks and loves every variety of fruits and vegetables. Fortunately for Aaron, just because he couldn't distinguish between peas and rocks, we didn't give up on proper meals. In the same way, just because when you are a kid you can't distinguish between Santa Claus and God, you don't give up on your imagination and assume that all your imaginary friends need to be extricated from your life. You see, if your imaginary friend somehow transforms your life, makes you a better human being, moves you from arrogance to humility, from greed to generosity, from hate to love—if this imaginary friend changes everything for you and makes you the kind of human being you've always longed to be but could never find the strength to become alone—do not, I repeat
do not,
ever give up on that imaginary friend, because that imaginary friend who changes everything for the good is the most real thing you'll ever know.”

Is it possible that the human imagination is the playground of God, that while we fill the imagination with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, our imagination was always intended to be the place where humans could interact with God? Only in our imagination can we begin to contain even the smallest expression of the bigness of God; only in our imagination can we accomplish anything, go anywhere, or become anyone; only in our imagination do we have boundless possibilities and endless potential; only in our imagination can we even begin to conceive of what reality might become if it began to reflect the imagination of God. In our imagination, conversations that come from someone who is all-knowing and all-powerful and all-present, for whom all things are possible, can be engaged at a human level.

The reason I didn't give up on God when I put away my other imaginary friends is that every time I create more room by vacating an imaginary friend, I find more space for those extraordinary encounters with the living God.

One of the great challenges in my early journey of faith was the seemingly perpetual war between creativity and spirituality. The faith journey seemed a product more of education and information than of imagination and passion. To be perfectly frank, I have never met God by studying a doctrine, but I have met God over and over listening to my dreams. The life of faith is less about gathering information than it is about expanding imagination. The movement Jesus started was a movement of dreamers and visionaries, not a movement of academics and theologians. The soul feeds on the imagination; the artist lives in the imagination. Imagination always precedes creativity. To engage in the creative act, you must be comfortable working with invisible material. Then comes the tricky part—materializing that invisible material. It's about moving imagination into image, transforming the invisible into the visible.

Have you ever noticed that you're more awesome in your imagination than you are in real life? I have often felt stunted by reality's effect on my talent. In my imagination, I can sing. I am the male version of Adele. If you could hear what I can hear, it would blow you away. But when I take that same extraordinary talent and try to exercise it in the real world, somehow my talent diminishes. In fact, if I were to be specific, if I could pin this down to the exact moment when my extraordinary talent becomes painfully ordinary, it's that moment when somebody else hears me sing. I am so clearly great in my imagination, but people keep letting me down. Reality keeps hurting my chances of having an extraordinary musical career. I can't seem to translate the experience in my imagination into the experience that plays out in reality.

My daughter, Mariah, on the other hand, seems to be able to translate what she hears in her head to what we hear when she sings. When we hear her sing, it's like stepping into a dream. That may be one way we discover our unique artistic space—that point where reality matches imagination. This may be the best indicator of a natural talent or where we find our natural sweet spot: how closely does our execution resemble our imagination? Part of the uniqueness of being human is that we are materializers of the invisible. We discover what we do best in life when we see something in our imagination and are then able to execute it in the real world. Sometimes this process works in reverse. I tried to water-ski once and failed miserably. Then I spent the summer working at SeaWorld, watching world-class skiers while trapped selling Cokes inside a kiosk. Without realizing it, I spent the summer watching, observing, and imagining myself performing the same feats that those skilled entertainers had spent a lifetime developing. To my surprise, the next time I skied, I could slalom effortlessly. I had been practicing in my imagination all summer long, and given the opportunity, I was able to translate it into reality.

Have you ever had an idea of yourself that was different from what played out in real life? More often than not, our focus is talent—to become a great doctor, a great teacher, a great writer, a great attorney. And it's completely human to imagine ourselves as the very best in a field for which we have a deep passion. How many of us haven't imagined ourselves as the next LeBron James or the next Tiger Woods or the next Steven Spielberg or the next Maya Angelou? I am reminded of the endless people I have met who quickly described themselves as an “idea person.” Why is it that more often than not the person who says “I am an idea guy” usually means “I don't actually like doing work” or “I have no specific skill set” or “I can tell you what to do, but someone else will have to figure out how to do it.” The only ideas that really matter are the ones that get turned into realities. There is no proof of creativity without action. The creative act requires both sides: it requires creativity, and it requires action.

For years, I signed all my books with three simple words—dream, risk, create. Each reminds me of the reason most of us never go from dreaming to creating: it's an uncomfortable middle space called risk. If the culminating moment of God's creative act was the creation of man, then it is clear that we cannot create without risk. God's ultimate act of creation—creating humanity in his own likeness, with the freedom to choose so that we might become authentic conduits of love—was the greatest risk that God ever undertook.

I love God's words to Jeremiah (1:5), when he reminds him, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

This is the intimate application of everything we have been talking about applied here to a specific individual. What God is saying to Jeremiah also goes for us: “I knew you before you were born.” How is it possible to know someone before he was born, unless for God the relationship begins while we are only an idea in his mind. Jeremiah, you were a dream in the heart of God, an idea in the mind of God, a manifestation of imagination. You exist because God uses invisible material to make all things visible.

Somehow it is exhilarating to me to realize that I was an idea in the mind of God before I was an embryo in the womb of my mother. Everyone knows that the quality of a product is directly related to the material used, the process chosen, and the artist who designs and creates it. For us, all of those are rooted in God. We were formed in the mind of God, designed by the hand of God, and created in the image of God. The fingerprints of God are all over us. But this is only how the process began.

Like a master artist, God entrusts us with the critical phase in the process we call life. This leads to the most important question: What is your idea of you? Who is it that you have decided to become? If your greatest work of art is the life you live, and ultimately life is a creative act, what life will you choose to leave behind as your masterpiece?

Who we were created to become already exists in the mind of God. It's placed in our physical DNA and in the longings of our soul. Our lives are supposed to be a manifestation of the imagination of God, and whatever else we leave behind—the life we choose to live and the person we choose to become—is the ultimate expression of the artisan soul.

What is inescapable is that we have been designed by God as a creative being. Each day that we walk this earth, whether we recognize it or not, we are in the process of creating. Our work, like God's, is to create. One question remains: What are we creating? What are we leaving in the wake of our lives? The words we speak, the choices we make, the actions we take are the material from which we not only create our lives but create the world around us.

Some have chosen to take this creative gift and turn it into a destructive force. That's an inherent risk when you design a creature as a creative being. Have you ever met someone who was unbelievably creative in causing pain and wreaking havoc on the world around them? If we choose as our tools violence, greed, bitterness, and vengeance, our creative gifts will bring pain and devastation to the world around us. But if we understand our lives as the canvas God has entrusted us to create, if we realize that our lives are to reflect the nature and essence of God, then we will choose to expand those things that reflect the heart and character of God. When we choose to create as an act of love, we join forces with the Creator of the universe and become givers of life.

Here we must move from being more than simply artists, to being designers as well. The artisan soul is driven by more than simple reflecting; it is driven by creating. Though far too often art is nothing more than a catharsis bringing relief to the deepest longings of our souls, the nature of our design demands of us far more responsibility than to create art for art's sake. The truth of the matter is that all art has an underlying narrative for which it advocates; all art is a declaration of meaning or the lack of it; all art is created both for self-expression and for the extension of self. Art changes the world, which is why art cannot be left in the hands of an elite few. We must embrace the critical realities that everyone is an artist, that everyone creates, and that everyone is responsible for the creative act. So if we are created by God and created by God to create, then the divine process must inform our process.

Long before design thinking became popular in the modern landscape of organizational and behavioral science, it was the blueprint of the opening chapter of the Scriptures. If a critical attribute of design thinking is to begin with the end in mind, from that end moving through synthesis to create the most human and organic process, then we find the pinnacle of that expression in Genesis 1. The Hebraic language reminds us that repetition exists for emphasis. You know what matters because they make sure you can't miss it.

The recurring phrases in Genesis 1 are built around two significant words—
good
and
living.
Everything God created was good, and that speaks of the essence of the creative act. The purpose of that creative act, though, is centered in that second word—everything was created for life. The sweeping movements of the creation of the universe, the creation of the sun and moon, the creation of the solar system, the creation of earth, the creation of the waters and the land—everything was created with the intention of creating a sustaining life. After the creation of the physical universe on this planet, the earth becomes the ultimate sustainer of life. It creates living beings—living beings that walk the earth, living beings that fly in the air, and living beings that swim in the oceans. The driving narrative of the story of creation is that the entire universe was designed with one particular outcome: living beings. And if the driving intention of the universe was life, then God's preeminent creative act happened on the sixth day, when he created man as a living being.

So if we apply design thinking backward, beginning with the end in mind, the ultimate end of the creative process was God's intention to create a living being designed in his image. Everything was created to sustain life for us. We may disagree with the summary of the existence of the universe, but the Scriptures begin with the basic declaration that the entire cosmos was created so that you and I could live. We find all the essential ingredients for design thinking in this creative process. For design to exist, there has to be intention, and everything in the opening narrative of the Scriptures is permeated with the intention of God.

The narrative of creation has for far too long been the center point of a battle between science and mythology, and all the while we keep missing the point. The point of Genesis is that God created us with intention, that the entire universe exists with intention, and that we, if we are to live life as God intended, must also live intentional lives. Ironically, everything else in creation lives within its intention without choice. Apple trees create apples—no debate. Happens every time. Antelopes give birth to antelopes; flounder spawn flounder. This creation is designed to be part of the creative process. Everything creates of its own kind. This, too, is a reoccurring phrase in Genesis 1.

Everything is created with intention. Nothing is arbitrary or meaningless. Humanity is God's culminating act of creativity, designed with the highest intention to reflect most personally the likeness of God. Ironically, we who were created with the highest intention were also created with the capacity to deny, betray, or demean that intention. Whereas a horse will always live as a horse is intended to live, humans may live inhumane lives.

The artisan soul reclaims its intention. We understand that with creative freedom comes creative responsibility. When we live our lives without intention, it is like throwing paint against the wall and pretending that it's art—unless, of course, when we are throwing that paint against the wall, there is intentionality behind it. If God's intention was to ensure the re-creation of life, we should choose no lesser intention for our lives. Every word, every action, every creative act should have as its ultimate intention to bring life to others.