First I wanted to thank you for the great feedback the last few weeks. No doubt there are some outstanding people in this community! This week I want to share my thoughts on something really dear to my heart, creative arts.
Art is the ability to see beauty where it does not yet exist. Art is a movement from chaos to order.
From a landscaper to an architect, from a painter to a potter, an artist can take random colors and shapes and make something beautiful. Art is subjective at some level, but when something truly captivating is assembled, the observer just kind of knows it. Great, creative art speaks at a very deep level to us. Teaching someone to think creatively teaches them to see the world through a lens of hope.
Chaos to order. The other day I sat down in my office with my five-year-old daughter. She wanted to draw a picture. As she drew trees, big puffy clouds, and two stick figures she was telling a story. She and daddy were together holding hands in a beautiful field. Her joy and optimism was so captivating. She could see such beauty and she helped me see it too. When the same broken crayons that clutter my floor are combined with the back of an old document and a young creative mind, beauty is formed.
It gives peace. It gives hope. Trash is turned into treasure.
I believe the more we remove the arts from our schools and the more we force people to live in a box with only the information we see and have right now, we will slowly drain hope out of our children and ultimately out of our communities.
I believe God created us to dream, to create. A good friend of mine once said, “I believe our capacity to creatively create is the image of God in us.” Is he right? I don’t know for sure, but I do know that creativity is an opposing force to what the rest of the universe is doing. As the law of entropy continually decays everything, creativity and the work that goes into it is ushering order and beauty into the chaos.
Let’s empower the creative arts; let’s teach people to see the world with hope. Let’s raise a few generations of people that see the potential in the world rather than just the misery that may be present now. Let’s mirror our Creator and create.
“In the beginning God created…” Genesis 1:1