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Creativity and Rest go Hand in Hand – Katherine Newsom

There’s something about the salty air by the sea that has always caught my attention. It’s always been that one thing of mine – that happy place, where I feel at peace, most attuned to God. 

A few years ago, we lived just blocks away from the Pacific Ocean, and I got so much joy in walking our dog the eight blocks there and back, walking past the morning smell of Kona Coffee, crossing over the Pacific Coast Highway, smelling the salt and sand as the blue horizon comes into view. If you listened close enough in the evenings, you could even hear the waves crash at our house, those eight blocks away. 

It was a remarkable gift to live there in a tiny two bedroom house, in a place where we were surrounded by gifts that inspired me: the 365 day summer sun, the palm trees lining the streets, the coffee shop and quick grocery in walking distance from the house, the sound of the ocean waves. 

It was a place where my creative juices were running free as I opened the windows to let the breeze in, played worship music loud on the tv, and let myself be free to paint… painting for friends, painting for our womens ministry, painting just because… And in feeling so comfortable there, I was also avidly writing… blogging about our trips, writing about my crafts, recording the details of our latest adventures.

I felt free to rest in these good gifts, comfortable in my place and work and school, and in return, those creative juices were running high. 

Isn’t it remarkable how much more of ourselves we can be, when we are comfortable in our surroundings, when we are given the freedom to learn and be? 

We are all created in the image of God, and as image bearers, we create because He creates. It’s wired in our DNA, to create. We would do well to learn from His example at the beginning of time – during the process of Creation. 

On the seventh day, God rested. He saw that it was good – these gifts he spent six days creating… and He rested. 

Create in the day, and rest. Do it again and again, then when you are done – rest, and take it in. Create, then rest. 

And rest in the presence of God.

Creativity and rest go hand in hand. By taking God’s example for us, we honor Him and His design for us. We were never meant to hustle, or to do this life alone. We can create for the masses and hustle for our own image, or we can create for God and be obedient to His calling on our lives. We can follow the world and never stop until we are burned out, or we can follow God and rest in His presence, for He gives rest to the weary.

When we rest in God, we become a truer version of ourselves. For it is in the mirror of God’s word that we learn who we truly are. And when we are confident and empowered in this freedom He gives, we free ourselves to be creative as He designed us. We are no longer bound by the world and the hustle and the glitz. We look to God, we look to Christ. The created mirror the Creator.

He created us. We in turn create to glorify Him and share what He has gifted us with. He also calls us to rest in Him, and as we rest, he molds us into truer versions of ourselves, which fuels our creativity even more.

Isn’t it remarkable how intertwined this becomes? In all this, we learn an important truth: we are the best version of ourselves when we are given the freedom to rest in God’s truth, and create for His glory.

Katherine Newsom is a writer, podcast host, birth and postpartum doula, and childbirth educator, who lives in the gulf coast of Texas with her family. She writes on her website, Simple Natural Mama, for Christian moms who are simple and natural minded. You can find her website at simplenaturalmama.com or
IG: @katherinelnewsom.

This article is just one from the rest issue, which also has creative prompts to inspire you to be creative yourself.
Read more about it here.

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Creativity: conduit of the deep – Libby John

Humanity bears a distinct signature mark upon us that no other living thing in all of creation has. It’s the imagination. This inner sanctuary is given to us as a sacred place of communion with our Creator. No one else can see into this sanctum except Him and you.

Along with this imagination, we were given an incredible tool to communicate these things of the inner soul. Creativity. It is the conduit to bring the deep things from the inside to the outside and gives us language for conversations with God. Creativity can help us discover and reveal things about the human condition that are hard to express like lament, sorrow, loss or even the question of our identity. It is the language God gave us to communicate these things of the deep. Through his own of acts of creativity in the creation of the world, he communicates the deep things of himself and invites us into the relationship. There’s a reason the ocean waves seem to call us or a mountain view calms us. It’s the song of creation singing back to it’s Creator and we’re invited to join in. One of my favorite quotes is by pastor Tim Keller. He says, “The observer of beauty always receives a passion to share that beauty with others.”

Creativity allows us to participate and share that beauty and also reminds us why beauty matters. We are giving worth to whose image we bear when we reflect and appreciate the beauty around us and in us. To be creative is to be human by divine design. No other living thing on earth bears this mark. It is the highway where heaven and earth meet and these two realms intertwine to open a portal for us to experience God in vivid, tangible ways. Through creative acts we can communicate the heavenly things we carry in our imaginations, this inner sanctuary that communes in the deep places with God. Creative expression recalls and reminds us of our divine identity as image bearers, fearfully and wonderfully made, and that life is precious and worth celebrating.

Each creative act embodies our purpose and echoes the good news of the gospel to the world that there is hope

In the Old Testament, King Solomon lamented that there was nothing new under the sun. However, when Jesus came, he said he is making all things new. As we sow seeds of beauty into the soil of this earth, we participate in this restoration process. With our time here on earth we are to be celebrating this one sacred life we’ve been given by responding to the deep calling out to us and the eternity set in our inner sanctuary. Our very lives are a restorative, creative act designed to be in deep communion with our Creator as he moves us toward being made new each day.

Libby John is a creative artist. As a singer/songwriter, she debuted her first EP in 2016 and first album in Oct. 2017. Libby is also a choreographer who works for universities and high school musicals and she teaches hip hop & modern dance classes. She has a passion to spur others on to be an influence on the culture through their faith & artistry which led her to create the podcast “Art & Faith Conversations”. Libby is a lover of small beginnings and finding beauty in the ordinary. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her husband & 3 daughters. Libby can be found sharing her creative journey and songs at www.libbyjohnartandsong.org

This is one of the articles in iola even in the deep issue. Read more about it here.

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To the mom who feels constantly needed and rarely seen – Amber Salhus

While our kids played in the next room, my friend and I stood in her kitchen, sipping coffee and talking about our dreams in hushed tones peppered with nervous laughter, as if the very topic was somehow taboo.

Frivolous.

Indulgent.

Maybe even selfish?

“I feel like I’ve lost pieces of myself since having kids…” She spoke quietly, almost to herself, but her words echoed loudly inside my own heart.

I knew exactly what she meant.

I think in an honest moment, many of us would admit we do.

Motherhood, especially in those early years, can be an engulfing experience. It’s a deeply beautiful, life-giving (literally), and fulfilling role that some of us have always dreamt of, but there can be moments when it feels as if motherhood and the minutia of the day might swallow our identity whole. Like we’re constantly needed yet rarely seen.

We’re busy doing those million and one little things that we worry don’t matter, even while knowing, deep in our hearts they do. We teach, we train, we pray, we worry, we kiss, we rock, we soothe, we comfort, we’re filled up and emptied clear out 100 times in a day. We lose sleep and gain access to chambers of our hearts we never knew existed. We’re driven to the edge of our sanity and then pulled back again in one suddenly tender moment.

We ride that rollercoaster of fear and worry, pride and dismay, wonder and bafflement, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

We love our life.

And yet…

We wonder about those pieces of ourselves that seem to have disappeared. Our audacity, our playfulness, our ability to dream. They don’t call. They don’t send flowers. They just slipped unceremoniously out the back door.

Will they ever come back?

As mothers we gladly make room for our children to play, to discover who they are, to explore their creativity, to try and fail. We tend and grow their dreams, teach gumption and courage, and we speak life over them…

So often forgetting that God still longs to do the same for us.

Even now.

Especially now.

A common theme I hear from every single mother I talk to, one I was once painfully familiar with myself, is the feeling that we’ve “lost” pieces of ourselves somewhere along the way since having children.

It feels bittersweet.

It feels disorienting.

It feels final.

As much as we love motherhood, we quietly question if it’s become our main identifier, if it’s the only important work we’ll ever do, or if it’s the final act in the story God is writing for us.

We go through our days vaguely aware that there are dreams hidden away in the corners of our heart, but we aren’t sure if they’re big or too small and to be honest we don’t have the time to figure it out.

We’re afraid to look closely at those dreams, to name them, or to bother God with them. He’s busy… WE’RE busy. So we let fear and doubt keep us from chasing them down.

We learn to live with an ache.

A longing.

Not for a different life, but a deeper life.

One where we’re fully awake to our unique gifting. Where we allow ourselves to believe that our dreams actually matter, and not just to us. Where we bravely pursue them in the middle of motherhood and our right now life, knowing that we don’t need permission, or a formal invitation, we need only to begin.

Five years ago I stood in my kitchen (because apparently the kitchen is where all my meaningful conversations take place now?) and I blurted out to a friend that I “wanted to write a book one day.” And then I laughed. I LAUGHED like it was some kind of hilarious joke. Because at that point in my life, as a stay at home mom with very young children and no “free time” to speak of, it honestly felt ridiculous, like I may as well have said that I wanted to move to Hollywood and be famous.

What a joke, right?

I wasn’t even blogging yet at the time, but my offhand “joke” struck a chord somewhere deep in my soul, shaking the dust off of a very hidden, very real dream to write. A dream that had always been there, but that I’d been too afraid to acknowledge.

It’s easier to leave those things safely tucked away in the peripheral of our consciousness, right?

Pursuing any dream is going to require quite a lot from us- it asks us to step out of our comfort zone, embrace risk, be vulnerable, put ourselves out there, learn humility and gumption, and to sit patiently within the tension of the creative process instead of struggle against it.

The thing is, I think God longs to partner with us in all of that.

This might seem obvious and trite to you, but for me it was nothing short of revelatory. I never would’ve admitted it aloud, but somewhere along the line I subconsciously decided that God didn’t really care about woo-woo stuff like “chasing dreams” and “making art”, or even beauty for the sake of beauty. (What can I say, sometimes I’m not very smart.)

Emily Freeman once said, “I believe, deep in my bones that we can’t separate creative work from spiritual formation.”

I’ve found this to be profoundly true of my own experience. In the last few years as I’ve woken up to my creative self and the dreams tucked away in my heart, as I’ve taken my place in the creative arena, every part of this process has been inexorably linked with my inner spiritual life.

I think that’s because God actually cares about this stuff, and when we start to care about it too, there’s an intimate fellowship with the Holy Spirit at work within us.

Moms, what would happen if we leaned in to those places that ache because they feel unimportant? 

What if all those pieces of ourselves that feel “lost” or shoved away in a drawer marked “Inconsequential” are the very key to our own unique brand of creativity?

What if we allowed ourselves to believe that God cares about the dreams tucked way in our hearts even more than we do, because he put them there, on purpose and for such a time as this? What if we found the gumption to walk towards them with boldness and an unflagging joy?

How different would our story be?

Take heart today, mamas. If you find yourself in a season of feeling more needed than seen, know that you have not been left on the shelf. Know that you are doing important work.

Did you hear that?

You are doing important work. 

Right now.

Every diaper change that turns into a tickle fight. Every moment you linger on their cheek. Every nap-time showdown. Every trip to the grocery store that takes twice as long and is half as productive. Every tiny, tender sacrifice of yourself. You are doing important work.

If you find yourself in a season of limited time, opportunity, or energy when “pursuing your dreams” and “exploring your creativity” feels impossible, just remember that the thing about seasons is they always change.

And whatever season you find yourself in, there’s always meaningful work for you to do, because you are always you.

Amber Salhus

Amber Salhus is a wife, mom, blogger, house-flipper, comedy lover, and burgeoning farmer. She lives in the Oregon countryside with her husband, their two kids, and their ever-growing list of animals. She openly shares the adventures of dreaming big in the middle of motherhood, navigating the creative process, and finding the humor in all of it at ambersalhus.com.

This article is taken from the Bloom issue