I realized there really is a natural interplay between my spirituality and my creativity. When I enter into a spirit of prayer, I can cultivate a receptive space and actually ask God for creative ideas that will enhance my my praying. Then these creative practices allow me to enter into the spiritual space even more quickly and deeply. The result is a spiraling effect leading to ever-expanding dimensions, encompassing both deeper spirituality and heightened creativity.
Is there something in your spirit that keeps telling you it should be different: more interesting, more engaging, more creative, more profound? Does your prayer life feel like you're eating the same food over and over every day - mixing the same ingredients but hoping for a new, more enticing dish?
As a kid, I was taught that if you opened the Bible in the middle you'd probably land on the book of Psalms. And near the middle is everyone's favorite, the 23rd, there is this line: "You prepare a table before in the presence of my enemies." I don't know how many times I've read or recited this Psalm without pondering what that line actually means, but here is my take on it. When things are a bit tense, when life is not going at its best, when the potential for disaster is just around the corner, when your enemies are all around you - and even staring you down! - that's when God lays out the red-checkered picnic cloth and says, "Oooo, this is a nice place. Let's hang out here together for a while...just you and me.
You can be assured, though, that prayer is unbounded, undetermined, and untethered. We may end a certain series of spoken words, but the spirit of the prayer stays with us, walks out the door, and down the street with us. At any moment of the day, we can pop back into that same spirit with just a pause on a bridge, the thought of a friend, or the whispered word, “thanks.
Although I had nothing to offer in return, I came to understand that there was something beneficially reciprocal happening to the people who were blessing me. For a few minutes, they suspended their normal egocentric lives, placed a fellow human being in higher priority than themselves, and expressed their hopes for the other's peace and well-being. In so doing, they inevitably lived life on a higher plane, if only for a few moments. It always smelled like the kingdom of God to me.
Tragedy has a cruel way of ripping off the masks of self-sufficiency and self-satisfaction. It yells in the streets, "No! Everything is not A-okay!" It cracks apart our airtight theologies about God having everything under control. It forces us to get real and really struggle with the big questions of life. It cautions us that this life journey we are on is not easily comprehended with a few sermon points but demands a lifetime of wisdom to even begin to fathom.