God loves to be creative, and He’s given us the ability to be creative too, in all kinds of different ways. We shouldn’t think that God is only interested in ‘spiritual’ things and not ‘secular’ things. We must grow spiritually, but we must also use the gifts He’s given us to fulfil His purpose here on the earth, and to bless others. For example, you could be a creative hairstylist, or come up with new recipes, or find ways to create job opportunities for prisoners to help them rebuild their lives. That’s not just secular, it’s spiritual too. Each of those things blesses others in some way. One way to think of the cross is to imagine its two posts: horizontal and vertical. The vertical post represents our relationship with God, what He wants to do for us and what He wants us to do for Him. The horizontal post represents what He’s called us to do for each other. You might think you’re not very creative, but once you discover your God-given gifts, it’ll release your creativity. Paul wrote, ‘We all have different gifts, each of which came because of the grace God gave us. The person who has the gift of prophecy should use that gift in agreement with the faith’ (Romans 12:6 NCV). We all have the capacity to be creative in some way, so we shouldn’t put ourselves down if we’re not as creative as we’d like to be or we think we should be. Creative thinking doesn’t necessarily mean original thinking. Often, creativity is a mixture of other people’s thoughts and ideas that we’ve picked up and blended together to created something new. So let’s resolve to use our creativity to glorify God and help others.

What Now?

Choose three or four random objects, and use your phone to take photos of them in as many different ways as you can, with different backgrounds, angles, lighting, etc. (They don’t all have to be great photos!) Keep all the photos to remind yourself of how creative you can be.