Last week, my church started a Vacation Bible School program for young kids. This year’s VBS theme is all about the value of life and generally celebrating the wonder of God’s creation. Being a creative sort, I was enlisted to help set up the room decorations. In one afternoon of decorating, I may have inadvertently driven home the point of the program to myself.
My brown paper tree felled itself about 12 times. NOTHING would stick to the cinderblock walls. The strings of yarn “seaweed” kept falling down from the ceiling. And the pool noodle coral collapsed at the slightest breath.
Like many people, I love to create things and work on artistic projects. An impulse, I think, given to humans by God the Creator. However, what I end up making often falls far short of what I imagine or want to create. I imagine that even the most technically skilled artists would say the same—that all their hard work and study and patience sometimes results in something less than what they hoped for.
I struggled to crudely imitate natural organisms like coral, trees, and rocks. Yet God simply spoke and brought into existence perfectly what He wanted. Organisms so intricately designed that we still don’t even understand most of them. Natural spaces so vast, such as ocean trenches, that we’ve yet to explore them fully. A planet suspended perfectly in space to support life in a universe so seemingly endless that we’ll probably never even scratch the surface of it if humanity lasts for thousands more years.
Genesis 1:31 says, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (NIV). When we build, make, cook, draw, write, compose, etc., we emulate the creative impulse modeled for us by God. But our effort and struggle to create what we want can remind us of just how spectacular a designer He is.
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