This post may not be what you think, but then again you might not be what you think you are either. What do I mean by that? Well this is a quest every creative will have to pursue at some point or another, but especially those whose talents are summoned to Christ. I’ll give you a personal example.
For most of my life, I had figured and hoped that I would be a professional artist. Put simply, I was going to earn my living by selling my creations. This manifested in a multitude of ways, everything from decorative crafts, to trying to create and my own comic book. I also pursued a lot of jobs in various aspects of graphic design. Most of it was unsuccessful and what wasn’t unsuccessful, often felt unfulfilling, which left me in some pretty dark places. My solution to this was to work with a workaholic drive trying to improve my lot in life, which usually just led to fatigue and frustration. I now know why this was. I was outside my creative design.
You see I wasn’t meant for that life. Oh I had talents for art, but I made the crucial mistake of thinking that meant I had to be a professional artist and when i came to faith I was pretty convinced that that was how I was going to glorify God. What eventually became apparent was art for art sake was not my calling. Looking back over my experiences from childhood, I could have picked up the clues. Yes, I always loved to make art, but there was more. From the time I was little I used art and my creativity to tell stories and communicate. Now I had some problems in childhood, largely because I was a human target in school and so I buried much of the external parts of the gift. They were still there, it was part of my creative design, that is the design my designer put upon me. Slowly God began to show me that art was not the be all end all for me. It was a tool for something that was, for me at least, greater. Art was going to be a tool I would use to communicate the greatest story ever told, the Gospel, and when I came upon my creative design, I found a big part of the meaning of life.
Now this begs a question, was all the stuff that led up to this point wasted? No! My graphic design work made me fast and helped me to become a better writer, which led me having skills useful to me both as an author and a speed painter, further, all the art I did was incredibly good practice for me. In the process of my pursuit of an art/design career, I learned to build websites, built my art skills, taught me communication skills and one other thing that should not be overlooked. It allowed me to pay the bills on my way to where I am. Today, I live in my “sweet spot.” At times I’ve wished I would have found this when I was younger, but the truth of the matter is everything happened right on time.
What’s your creative design? Seek the Lord and ask Him to show you.
AMOKArts 