Universally, Christians believe that we, human beings, are created in the image and likeness of God. In its simplest form, our highest calling to reflect that nature as truly and as fully as we are able. I would argue that, first and foremost, this means fulfilling the command to love, but it also has other implications. For one, we know that it is in God's nature, being a triune entity, to exist in community. For another, and most pertinent to what I say here, we know God to be a creative being and to delight in creation, whether that creation occurs by hand or by word. Moreover, our experience of both the physical universe and the inspired Scripture suggests that God creates not only for God's own enjoyment, but because God's creations provide us a window toward understanding who God is.
This, the act of creation, is perhaps the most instinctive manner in which we reflect our status as Image Bearers. It is our natural inclination to find ways to take the ideas that exist in the hazy ether of our minds' eyes and place them firmly in reality. We delight, from our earliest ages, in making things. We stack our blocks into towers and our LEGOs into spaceships. We form sounds and then words and then sentences and finally stories. In doing so, we marvel at our own authority while simultaneously sharing ourselves as directly as possible.
It's unfortunate, then, that as we age, we tend to give up on exercising our own creative talents. We satisfy ourselves with limited means of expression while seeking joy in the creative output of others. We listen to music instead of performing it. We buy our meals prefab or follow the same time-honored recipes instead of inventing our dinners. We consume culture instead of creating it, likely under the unfortunate notion that the value of creating exists more in the quality of the product and less in the act itself. I'm as guilty of this as anybody.
When we don't create, though, we abandon one of the most powerful tools we have for relating to God's creation. Making things exposes us to our own understanding of the world around us and proclaims that understanding to others. Creating gives us an outlet to share why our views are right while, at the same time, calling us to understand our limitations. It asks us to confront our values -- aesthetic, moral, or whatever else -- and to recognize that they are not perfect.
Certainly, there is a place for consuming and critiquing the output of others. Doing so broadens our appreciation for what is possible and helps us connect with other people. But living as so many of us do, simply grazing among the efforts of those bolder than ourselves, is a sad way to be. Go, tell a story, draw a picture, sing a song. Do something as only you can do it, even if that means doing it poorly, and grow from the act.
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Right on. There's something intrinsically good about creating, from writing to singing to programming (still remember the shitty RPGs I tried to code on my TI-83 in high school math class, and how amazing it was to create these rule-bound systems that you could interact with. Speaking of which: have you run into the indie game SpaceChem? A CS friend of mine says it's the closest he's ever come to a game that reproduces the rush of programming).
And then there needs to somehow be some further step, to separate prideful acts of creation from humble ones. Tower of Babel vs. Temple of Solomon, the songs of the descendents of Cain from the psalms of David. Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro says "The poet is a little God", but he means it satanically: the poet creates his own, completely independent and entirely self-referential reality, which replaces God.
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