Creation

God placed in us, his people, the desire and ability to create. I'm not talking about breathing life into an inanimate object. I'm talking about taking raw materials and changing them into something better. Whether it's taking wood and stone and metal to make a house, or taking photos and paper and tape to create an album of memories, or holding paintbrush or pencil in hand and recording your impressions of beauty-- everyone creates. Even the computer programmer, the blogger and the gardener are imagining something different and then making it happen.

Even in these little things, we tend to gloss over the effort that has gone into a new work. I flip through a friend's finished scrapbook, make a couple of comments on pictures or an interesting layout and then set it aside. I look at the shelves Edwin is building and see that they're going to be nice, but I don't inspect every nail (or is he using screws?). He would know. The creator knows.

If a book is well-written, the reader won't even consider the author. I never realized how many hours writers spend staring into space, or writing and rewriting, and then erasing it all and starting again until all the words and scenes and characters fall into place. There's a process in creation that I need to appreciate.

We rush past God's creation all the time. "The mountain's beautiful today," I say to the kids as itpasses in and out of view while we're driving. It's pretty and I appreciate it, but I don't know the mountain. Not the way its creator does-- every pebble, every plant, every wind-torn tree. "The stars are pretty tonight," I say and look up into the sky-- for about a minute. Scientists think they've found liquid water on one of Saturn's moons. Incredible that we found it, but even more incredible that God put it there.

Consider the lilies of the field.